Fun With Alternate Realities
by Rainey Dae
Summary: A Post-Hallows AU in which things happen. It starts on chapter fifteen. There's some other stuff before that that has something to do with the title of the fic, but I can't be arsed to tell you what it is in this many characters.
1. 1: Sorted Out

1

Sorted Out

In the main hall of an ancient castle, an eleven-year-old boy named Sirius Black sat on a three-legged stool and stewed in his own self-consciousness. He was young, conflicted, and, for the moment, uncorrupted by the beliefs of his ancient pureblood family. He was about to have the course of his life decided by a ceremony involving a hat.

There was a good deal riding on what the hat said and where it sorted him. He had known this since a very young age. He was a Black—a proper, pureblood, Black, and the only place for a Black was Slytherin. He knew this, on a superficial level, but he did not understand. This was perfectly understandable. He was an eleven year old. There was a lot he did not understand. What he did not understand, at that particular moment and about that particular ceremony, was whether or not he wanted to be a Black after all. He had met a lot of his relatives, and he had met a lot of nasty people, and the correlation was not exactly coincidental.

He took a deep breath. That was the answer. He did not want to be a nasty person. He did not want to be a Slytherin. He did not want to be a Black. Just then, as he sat there waiting for the rest of his life to come down around his ears and decided just how it was going to fall, something happened, and something changed. Just before the deputy headmistress placed the hat on his head, his eyes slid over a familiar face in the mass of hall tables, and his attention snagged. He looked into the dark, expectant eyes of his cousin Bellatrix, and he realized just what his family would do to him if he decided that he didn't want to be one of them. He barely had time to register that he was wearing a hat at all before he felt it being lifted off again, and just above the roar from the students, he could hear the echo of what the hat had said.

Slytherin. Hanging there. Lingering on the air like a bad joke. This wasn't what he had wanted. Not really. But what did it matter? He looked at his classmates, and James Potter did not look back. That's what it mattered. They had been friends. For half a second, Sirius wanted to scream. To shout at James that it wasn't his fault, and that Salazar Slytherin himself could eat the sorting hat for all he cared. Then he looked back at his cousins. Bellatrix gave him an approving nod, Andromeda a friendly shrug. He was already walking towards them.

Bellatrix and Andromeda scooted aside for him to sit between them as Narcissa smiled sweetly from across the table. He sat down and let their praise and reassurance assuage him. He could not be different. Not even if he wanted to. Not even if he tried. As he realized this, he realized that he didn't have to be. He sighed as something very heavy began to lift from his eleven-year-old soul. It was the weight of independence. The weight of righteousness. The weight of morality.

Who was James Potter anyway? Just some blood-traitor Gryffindor. They never would have gotten on very well anyway. Sirius Black sank quietly and without fuss into his proper place in wizarding society, and he knew that it was probably for the best.

AN: This is going to sound weird, but this kind of hurt to write. Oh well. This story isn't going to follow chronological order, mind. There's a twenty-something year time skip and a hop across realities in the next chapter, so just try and go along with it. Basically, it's a character examination of Sirius, Snape, and Lupin, and what sort of people they would have been with and without each other.


	2. 2: Rabbit Hole

2

Rabbit Hole

Some twenty-five years after Sirius Black had been sorted into Gryffindor, he, now a middle-aged man, a fugitive from the law, and a member of the most powerful dark side resistance group in existence, was in a duel with his cousin Bellatrix. It was easily the most interesting thing he had done in a year and a half, and he was not about to spoil the moment by taking it seriously. Instead, he spoiled the moment by stumbling backwards through a large foreboding archway and landing flat on his back.

As he jumped back to his feet, he began to wonder if he hadn't been knocked unconscious by his fall. Everyone in the room had changed position since he had last looked, and he made a habit of knowing where he stood in any battle. He assessed his position in wonder. Every death eater in the room was not only preoccupied, but preoccupied with their backs to him. The Order had lost ground tactically, but at the moment the only person in any position to attack him was Kingsly Shacklebolt. As Sirius had been making this assessment, he had, of course, been firing off stunners.

Whether they hit or not, the death eaters were caught completely off guard, and the half-second's confusion over how someone had materialized behind their ranks was enough for another Order member to take them down. A silence fell in the chamber as the Order realized that they had won, broken first by Sirius' bark of disbelieving laughter, and second by one final stunning spell from an equally disbelieving Shacklebolt. Sirius didn't even have time to look surprised before he hit the floor. He heard, as his consciousness receeded, Kingsley's low voice in the back of his skull, as the Auror said what was on the minds of every member of the Order.

"What the bloody hell was that about?"

* * *

Sirius came to in the not-unfamiliar setting of the inside of a cell. First, he swore very loudly, and then he swore very loudly again. Then he realized that he was not only in a cell, but in a cell surrounded by Death Eaters, so he swore very quietly, and all the more foully to make up for it. After a very long three seconds in which he attempted very unsuccessfully to calm down, he decided to abandon calm and get the hell out. Calm had never done him much good anyway. He was, as established, in a cell, but he was not, as he reminded himself over and over again, in Azkaban.

"_It could be worse, you could be in Azkaban."_ was not what most people would call a healthy outlook on life, but it was usually all Sirius had to work with. He took several very quiet deep breaths and looked around again. In a cell. _Not in Azkaban._ Surrounded by death eaters. _Sleeping death eaters. _He backed towards the cell door and looked out. It was a Ministry of Magic holding cell, with a pair of Aurors and a pair of Dementors for guards. With the Dementors considerably more interested in the young and comparatively joyful Aurors than with a bunch of stunned Death Eaters, Sirius decided that if he was ever going to get out, it was going to be now.

He backed up into a corner, turned into a dog, and began to sprint towards the door. The bars were just far enough apart that he could maybe kid himself into believing that he could get through them, but not far enough that it would be anything any sane man would try. Sirius began to force his way through and heard his lower ribs break before he realized that plenty of Order members would be able to vouch for his innocence. He was through the cell door and into the corridor before he remembered that it had been Shacklebolt who had stunned him in the first place.

He pushed the thought from his mind and kept running, and though he stirred up something of a ruckus in the atrium as he passed, he was into the streets and gone before anyone realized what had happened. It was in those London streets, where, by a fortunate coincidence, Sirius picked up the scent of one of the very few people he knew he could trust no matter what, and followed. It was Remus. As far as Sirius could tell, he had walked straight from the ministry visitor's exit to St. Mungo's several blocks away. Eventually, he reached the entrance and settled in to wait.

***

Remus Lupin exited the wizarding hospital just as the sunset cast the last of the buildings into shadow and a cold, hollow wind began to wander through the streets. He shivered and walked on. It had been a long, strange few days, and a long cold walk was exactly what he needed. The prophesy. The rescue. That mad death eater who had saved them all. Tonks. Just then, his musings were interrupted by an indignant yip from a massive, mangey-looking stray. Remus paused. He hadn't been paying much attention to the dog, but once he did, it was difficult to ignore. It was massive-- easily the biggest dog he had ever seen. Even so, Remus wasn't afraid of dogs. It was usually quite the opposite. He turned away and kept walking. He hadn't gone a step when the dog did something very strange.

"Remus," it said tersely "What's going on?" Remus turned back, and the dog was not a dog anymore, but a sallow, unhealthy looking man, who fixed Remus with a cold, standoffish stare.

"Don't move." Remus said as he leveled his wand at the other man.

"Moony—?" Black began, but thin black cords had already shot out of Remus' wand and wound their way around his hands and feet. Black fell numbly against the alley wall. He would have been speechless even if he hadn't been gagged.

"Moony…" Remus repeated as he approached the other man. "James Potter used to call me that." he said mildly. "You probably wouldn't remember him. Stupefy."


	3. 3: Caucus Race

3

Caucus Race

Albus Dumbledore stood in the early-evening darkness of his office and stared out onto the Hogwarts grounds. After what felt to everyone else in the room to be an inappropriately long time, he turned to face them.

"This is, I will be the first to admit, an uncommonly strange occurrence." he said. "And I think that all there is left to do at this point…" he turned to a figure in the corner that bore a grotesque resemblance to a corpse someone had propped up in a chair, and drew his wand. "…is to ask him ourselves." Everyone else in the room emitted a palpable but unvoiced discontentment with the headmaster's decision. The portraits on the wall were less polite. The headmaster—the current, living headmaster, turned away from his former pupil once more as the portraits fell silent.

"Does anyone have any further comment on the matter?" he asked with an unusual flatness to his tone. Molly Weasly was the first to step forward.

"Headmaster, whatever fortunate act of lunacy he might have committed, the fact remains that he is a Death Eater, and this is a _school_. He shouldn't have been brought here at all, let alone woken up for a bit of a chat…"

"Molly, dear, he's in a room full of Aurors," said Arthur.

"Not to mention" Mad-Eye Moody growled from somewhere in the back of the group, "he's out of his wits and tied to a chair. Let's get on with this, Albus. _Ennervate._"

"_Stupefy!_" Molly countered immediately. "Alastor, let's handle this like civilized people!"

"Yes, Molly," said Remus as he stepped in front of her wand. "Let's. And let's try not kill him" he inclined his head towards Black, who was still twitching from his simultaneous unstunning and restunning. "while we're at it." Molly's nostrils flared.

"Remus you of all people should know what danger he poses! Meeting him in that alley! Imagine if he hadn't—"

"Called out my name and tried to strike up a conversation with me while I hexed him? Look, I've already told you, I don't think he meant any immediate harm and I want to know why. Dumbledore?"

"Thank you Remus. Now… _Ennervate._"

***

Sirius jolted awake with the feeling of sick panic that one would expect following a strange and lingering nightmare. He tensed and looked around. McGonigal looked at him as though he were something dead and unpleasant, Remus looked at him as though he were a stranger, and Moody looked at him with both eyes at all times. Sirius' strange and lingering nightmare was lingering far longer than was customary. Eventually, he found a face that was not overtly hostile.

"Albus…" he began, but trailed off under the old man's gaze. Even that was wrong. Off. A little too shallow. A little too polite. Everything was wrong.

***

Albus Dumbledore scrutinized Sirius Black over the top of his half-moon spectacles. Remus had been right, there was no hostility there. As far as Albus could tell, Sirius was just as confused as the rest of them. They stared at each other in silence. The younger man had visibly relaxed at the sight of him, and Albus could not name very many Death Eaters that did that. Now, though, he seemed to have lost his nerve. All that was left was a look of pleading dismay. Sirius was looking for something from any of them, something he had unwaveringly expected to find, but what it was he was looking for, Dumbledore was hesitant to guess.

A few unusually long seconds passed before Sirius looked down at himself and then back at Albus with an expression of indignant surprise.

"Albus, why am I tied to a chair? And…" he half twisted in some interrupted jesture, let an irritated sigh hiss through his teeth, and then continued. "And why is everybody looking at me as though I'm about to burst into flames? Anybody?" his voice dropped slightly. "Remus?"

Remus felt more than saw Black's gaze land on him, then glanced to either side of him as if expecting someone else named "Remus" to jump out and clear up the whole mess. He had no such good fortune.

"Why are you acting like this?" Remus asked suddenly, but in a tone that was more curious than accusatory. The death eater looked taken aback.

"Acting like what?"

"Like you know me." Sirius looked as though he had been slapped across the face.

"Remus… I do know you. I've known you my whole life."

Remus snorted. "Sirius, we weren't even in the same house, let alone friends. We only 'know' each other in a very loose sense of the—"

"Wait, what?"

"---word."

"Gryffindor, Remus, both of us! We've been friends since first year! What's happened to you?"

"Me?" Remus asked incredulously. "You're the one who's off his head…"

Just then, just when Sirius thought his life could become no stranger, Severus Snape walked in.

"I've brought the potions you requested for the interrogation, headmaster." He made his way through the line of Order members, caught sight of the death eater in question, and froze in his tracks. "..Sirius?"

Sirius, meanwhile, made such a spirited effort to jump out of his chair that he would have fallen over had the Headmaster not been there to steady him. Severus stepped forward cautiously.

"Sirius, is something wrong?"

In response, Sirius coughed out something between a bark of laughter and a hoarse, dry, sob. "Oh, this is just brilliant. The one person who doesn't look at me like I'm going to kill them and it's _you_. You know what else, Snivellus?" Severus looked at him blankly. "Now I know I've slipped into some hellish land of opposites. _You've washed your hair_." He let his head loll back against the chair and stared up at the ceiling, his shoulders shuddering every so often with another bout of repressed laughter.

Remus Lupin was the one to break the silence.

"Snivellus…" he repeated, with a curious glance at Snape, who had been stunned into silence. "James Potter used to call you that."

Severus nodded, never taking his eyes off Sirius. "So he did, Remus. So he did."

AN: This chapter is dedicated to my one reviewer =P


	4. 4: Tea Party

4

Tea Party

"Albus," said Alastor Moody as he stumped towards the door. "If you ever take a notion to conduct a real interrogation on this piece of scum, feel free to let me know. Until then—" And then Sirius chose a very stupid time to make an observation.

"Hang on, Moody," he slurred lazily, "how'd you manage to loose your whole hand since last night?"

Moody did a well-practiced 180 degree peg-leg pirouette and stalked over to Sirius with a speed and dexterity that one would not expect of a one-legged, one-eyed and suddenly one-armed man. His false arm creaked like a rusty door and clamped itself firmly over Sirius' mouth as Moody leaned inches from Sirius' face.

"Oh," he growled quietly "It takes much less than a day to take a man's arm off. I would show you," the arm gave one more metallic whine as Moody pushed the chair back on two legs, leaving nothing to support Black but the metal arm on his face. "But you already know that, don't you?" And Moody let go and walked away, followed by most of the remaining order. Once the office had cleared of everyone but Severus, Remus, Sirius, and Dumbledore, Snape reached down and set Sirius right. Sirius stared blankly after the ex-auror, a ghostly white handprint still pressed into his face.

"He's…" Sirius said eventually, "He's a bit touchier than I remember him."

"And you," Snape muttered, "are exactly as stupid as I remember you." Sirius shivered slightly.

"Well, Albus," said Remus, "What do we do with him?"

Sirius, Severus, and Remus all looked at Dumbledore expectantly, who sank into his desk chair and closed his eyes wearily. "Tell me about yourself, Sirius." he said quietly.

Sirius faltered. "Myself, Albus?" he made to face the headmaster, but found he could only crane his neck to see him out of the corner of his eye. Then, without warning, the ropes holding him to the chair fell away. He turned to give Remus some sort of acknowledgement, but found that Remus was busy looking at Snape as if he'd lost his mind, and Snape was the one lowering his wand. Sirius then found the that the thought of Snape doing anything but hating him was too unnerving to act upon, so he settled for spinning around to look at Dumbledore.

"Yourself, Sirius. You, the apparently benign and rational personality we see before us, are either some long-lost facet of your own subconscious, awoken perhaps as a saving-throw act of self-preservation when the rest of your mind gave way to madness… perhaps a response to a lifetime of magically-enforced obedience and control being very suddenly lifted… perhaps an elaborate act, or an inventive use of mind-control magic on a person without much mind left to speak of… or perhaps," he opened one eye and turned it on Sirius "You are someone else. You are Sirius Black, but one that… for instance, was adopted at birth and raised in an entirely different environment, somehow crossed into the world of the Sirius Black we knew and expected you to be.

"Either way," he closed his eye again. "It should be an interesting tale. Start with your childhood, your years at Hogwarts… that sort of thing."

Sirius swallowed. "Do you… do you think you could tell me about myself first? I mean, if I'm anything like me, a good third of this story is going to take about one sentence to cover…"

"One sentence indeed." Dumbledore said dryly. "Well, I don't see why not. Severus, you know him best."

Severus nodded. "We were very close friends all through—"

"Yeah, hold up, that's about were this story starts making no sense."

"You were raised in a customary pureblood home by Walburga and Orion Black. I trust you know—"

"Yes. I was there for that bit." Sirius said shortly.

"And then sorted into Slytherin, with me. You, Lily Evans, Regulus and I were close friends, though Lily was in Gryffindor. You and a Gryffindor named James Potter had what could eventually have been called a friendly rivalry, albeit an unusually dangerous one, and by seventh year you had served so many detentions together that it almost seemed like you two were getting caught on purpose." Sirius looked a cross between horrified and fascinated, but managed to hold his tongue.

"After graduation, things changed. The war pulled Lily and James to fight for the light and Regulus and I were… drawn towards more questionable allegiances. You never minded the dark arts yourself, of course, but you were always unusually moral about them. Regulus and I always treated it as a bit of a joke…" Severus swallowed. "And then we became death eaters. All three of us. You said that if we were going to get killed being stupid purebloods… that they were going to have to kill you first.

"You always tried to duck the dirty work, but you never said no to a fair fight. Some days, though, you couldn't get out of it. You would be… serving the Dark Lord, but with none of the relish of most Death Eaters. Truth be told, it was killing you, you and Regulus both. One day, Regulus snapped. I don't recall what it was that they asked him to do, but… he wouldn't do it. He died. There was nothing left for you, and you were going to do something… stupid." Severus could no longer look Sirius in the eye, and instead stared stonily out the window behind him.

"I turned you in. I brought you to the Auror department and walked away. I knew they'd lock you up. I thought it might… give you some time to calm down. It certainly stopped you from carrying out your plan… but then the Potters were killed--"

"How did that happen?" Sirius asked suddenly.

Remus looked up. "Fidelius Charm. Betrayal."

"Peter Pettigrew?" Remus nodded. "Little bastard. Where is he now?"

"Died just after Lily and James. Hunted down by the remaining death eaters."

"Did you find a whole corpse?"

"Er… I suppose, if you pieced him back together again…"

"Oh, good. Sorry, Snivelus, you were—"

"Just getting to the part where I left my best friend in Azkaban for a decade and a half." he said flatly. "When Voldemort fell to Harry—"

"Oh, right, Harry," Sirius said brightly and turned to Remus. "He's alright isn't he? Got out of the Department of Mysteries in one piece?"

Remus smirked. "No thanks to you. You gave him a long-range apendisectomy before you turned all chummy and saved our arses… He's going to be fine though," Remus added hurriedly. "Kinglsy's the one you put in St. Mungo's. Lacerated his intestines, I think they said."

"And I was mad at him for stunning me…" Sirius grinned "Think he'd appreciate a get well card?"

"As I was saying, Sirius," Snape continued, "With Voldemort fallen, I couldn't get you back out of Azkaban. By the time Voldemort started breaking out his followers, your mind and any vestiges of compassion you might have had were long since lost."

"It's funny," Sirius said distractedly as Snape wallowed silently in his own guilt, "It's always the side I'm fighting for that puts me in Azkaban."

"Ready to share your story, then, Sirius?" Asked Dumbledore.

Sirius nodded. "It's pretty much the same, but I was a Gryffindor, I was friends with James and Remus and Peter, you and I" he pointed at Snape "Hate each other's guts, and after graduation I joined the Order of the Phoenix."

"And the Potters?" asked Remus.

"Fidelus Charm. Betrayal, and a stupid little bluff. You and Dumbledore thought I was the secret keeper, but it was Peter. Then Peter framed me for his murder and faked his own death."

"Little bastard." said Remus. "I take it Peter messed up and got caught?"

"That would have been mighty convenient. No, I had to hunt the little bugger down myself."

"What, from Azkaban? How well did that work?"

"I escaped, smartass."

Dumbledore, Snape, and Lupin then looked up and said in near unison "Nobody escapes from Azkaban."

"That," said Sirius, "was eerie. But I did. Unregistered animagus." he looked at Remus. "Big black dog."

Remus nodded. "That's how you got out of the ministry. The dementors theoretically wouldn't be as powerful against an animal…"

"Took me a while though, so there's not much after that to tell. Spent a year trying to catch Peter, another on the run, and another as designated house-elf and dead-weight of the Order of the Phoenix."

The four men sat for a moment in pensive silence. Sirius cautiously rose from his chair. Dumbledore and Snape were far too deep in their own thoughts to care, and while Remus idly fingered his wand and watched him rather more closely than he would have a less suspicious individual, he made no move to stop him. Sirius still found the foreign attitudes of his former friends (and enemy) unnerving, so he wandered around the candle-lit office in hopes of finding comfort in its familiarity. Remus wondered (not for the first time) what on earth all the silver instruments did, and (perhaps for the first time) just how much damage they could do in the wrong hands.

Just then, the wrong hands and their accompanying person froze in front of the fireplace. "Albus," Sirius called, fixated on the empty hearth, "were you expecting a floo call?"

The hot, dry whooshing of the floo network had reached the headmaster's desk, but before anyone could react, a bright green flame blazed and a young woman stumbled out of the fireplace and into Sirius, who caught her reflexively. The soot-covered visitor coughed and looked up.

"Thanks… wait. You." She pulled a wand from the pocket of her coat (which she had put on over what appeared to be hospital robes) and pointed it, with very little conviction or coordination, at Sirius. "Don't try anything funny."

"Don't worry, Tonks," he said with a grin as he gently pushed her wand-tip away from his face.

"Oi, what'd I say about—woah." She made a drunken attempt to push the death eater away, but succeeded only in grabbing a fistful of his shirt and stumbling into him once more. Neither of them noticed that the three other men in the room had drawn their wands and encircled the strange pair. They did notice, however, when the fire roared once more and Kingsley Shacklebolt stepped out, also in hospital garb. Tonks smiled. "Wotcher, Kingsley."

"Tonks," he sighed "When Mad-Eye said that we should help, I'm fairly certain he meant _later_. As in tomorrow, or the next day, or any day, really, that you're not liable to… how did this even happen?" he asked, looking incredulously at Tonks, who appeared to be supporting most of her weight on a death eater.

"A day that I'm not liable to trip and fall into some death eater, Kingsley, would be never. Come on, you're the only one other than the kids that had a good look at him." She prodded Sirius in the chest. "Is it the same guy?"

"First of all, Black, please let go of her and back away slowly." Sirius held out his empty palms. Kingsly sighed.

Sirius carefully disentangled Tonks' hands from his robes, keeping a wary eye on Kingsley the whole time. Kingsley reached out and pulled Tonks back towards the fireplace, where she could cling to him instead.

"Thank you. Now, as long as we're here…" he took a moment to consider. "No. This isn't the same man." Dumbledore nodded.

"We were beginning to suspect as much. Could you elaborate, Kingsley?"

"Well, he hasn't killed or maimed anyone yet and he's not wearing death eater robes… and this one looks a bit less… corpse-ish."

"Oh, Kingsley, you're such a flatterer." drawled Tonks. "Where'd you put the food?"

"It's on a tray on the floor."

"Brilliant. Hey, Remus, Snape, Death Eater, someone with a sense of balance and not out of it on potions, come get this for me, will you?"

"Headmaster?" said Kingsley.

"Oh, it's quite alright. I fancy some tea myself…"

"Actually, I was wondering about Black, sir."

"Oh yes, of course." Sirius and Dumbledore both tore their attention away from the tray of pillaged hospital refreshments. "It seems, Kingsley, from what Sirius has told us and a bit of magical theory that we needn't get into here, that this Sirius Black has fallen out of his proper version of reality and into our own. Sirius, can you recall passing through the veiled archway you were fighting near at any point?" Sirius nodded.

"Just before Kingsley stunned me."

"And just after I stunned you." added Kingsley. "That's why you had as long as you did to take out death eaters. You—the you that I was dueling, only fell through because I stunned him, except it wasn't so much through as it was against. He went through one side and came back out the same side, as if he had turned around mid-air."

"As I suspected." Dumbledore said quietly, and continued more to himself than anything. "The veil was a monumental step in the theoretical magic of reality-breeching. It was meant to be a sort of door. Unfortunately, whenever anything or anyone went through it, they either died or passed straight through. The problem was that there was no vacancy in another reality for them to fill. In Sirius' case, his life has had two possible realities that included him falling through the veil at exactly the same moment, but from the opposite sides. Rather than die, you—"

"What," Tonks interrupted from across the office, where Remus had managed to land her in Sirius' vacant chair, "is with all this rope? Have you been tying people up?" She whipped around to glare accusingly at Dumbledore. "Have been tying him up?" she gestured vaguely towards Sirius. "Shame on you, he's a nice bloke. C'mere Black, we've got those little triangle sandwiches."

Sirius smiled. He was not one to argue with little triangle sandwiches, and he knew that whatever magical anomaly had brought him here would probably keep until he had finished eating. Dumbledore made to follow, but Severus stopped him.

"Headmaster," he said quietly, "if this Sirius only came through because there was another him here to switch places with, doesn't that mean that our Sirius has switched places with him?"

"It is… more than likely, Severus. We can only hope that the Sirius we know was a bit less effective than this one. But come, no use dwelling on what can't be helped. Not when there are little triangle sandwiches afoot." he winked and turned on his heel to join the impromptu picnic, followed, somewhat hesitantly, by Severus. Inappropriate joviality always put him ill at ease, especially when it involved sandwiches.

AN: Once again, this story owes its speedy updates to Deisegirl. And I think I got a bit carried away writing drugged up Tonks… That was just entirely too much fun.


	5. 5: The Things That Go Bump in the Night

5

The Things That Go Bump in the Night

_**BANG!**_

Number 12 (_**BANG!)**_ Grimmauld place (_**BANG!) **_ was a cold, (_**BANG!)**_ empty place for nearly six (_**BANG!)**_ years. Then something happened, (_**BANG! BANG!)**_ and it wasn't anymore.

_**BANG!**_

_**BANG!**_

_**BANG!**_

These days, (_**BANG!)**_ there was a steady, (_**BANG!)**_ rhythmic, (_**BANG!)**_ing noise that echoed up (_**BANG!)**_ from the cellar and through the (_**BANG!)**_ very rafters of the old (_**BANG!)**_ house. There were only two (_**BANG!)**_ living creatures (_**BANG!) **_left (unless of course (_**BANG!)**_ you count the furniture). One of them, (_**BANG!)**_ a generally un(_**BANG!)**_flappable young man, (_**BANG!) **_was sure he was going mad (_**BANG!) **_from the ceaseless (_**BANG!)**_ing. The other man (_**BANG!)**_ couldn't possibly go (_**BANG!) **_madder—there is only so mad (_**BANG!)**_ that any one man can go.

_**BANG!**_

_**BANG!**_

_**BANG!**_

Albus Dumbledore couldn't shake a feeling of dread as he walked up the path to Number 12 Grimmauld place. As he entered, he was greeted by an ungodly ruckus. It sounded as though someone was hammering a paving stone against a heavy wooden door over and over again, backed by the steady, soulless howl of the portraits.

"Kingsley?" He tried to shout, but even to his own ears, it sounded like "(_**BANG!)**_". He tried again. "Kings(_**BANG!)**_?"

"I'm (_**BANG!) **_in the kitchen,__Al(_**BANG!)**_." Albus walked towards the voice. He found Kingsley slouched at the kitchen table with an open bottle of firewhiskey in one hand, bits of plaster crumbling from the ceiling around him, and stray dishes shattered on the floor.

"(_**BANG!)**_?" Kinsley shook his head.

"I ca(_**BANG!)**_ what you're s(_**BANG!)**_"

"Thi(_**BANG!) **_useless… SILENCIO!"

"THAT NEVER—!" Kingsley paused for a moment in disbelief. "…works." He looked around. The cabinets and the door still jumped every few seconds, but they made no sound. He let out a long sigh of relief and lay his head on the table with his eyes closed. Albus picked his way through the shattered glass and sat down beside him.

"Kingsley," he said as the shards of two teacups pieced themselves together on the table and a pot of tea began to make itself on the stove behind them. "how long has he been like this?"

Kingsley unsteadily tipped some firewhiskey into his teacup. "Since the fight at the department of mysteries." he said. "I woke him up right afterwards, and he tried to curse me. Brought him back here and woke him up, and he tried to strangle me. Locked him in the cellar and let him wake up on his own, and… this." he waved his hand around the trashed room. "Sir, I'm not sure it's exactly him."

"Well, he is acting most unlike himself…"

"I mean he looks different, Albus. Like he did when he first got out of Azkaban."

"Curious… Kingsley, was Sirius fighting anywhere near the veiled archway?" Kingsley nodded.

"He might have even gone through it, but it's hard to say. I was a bit distracted at the time…" Dumbledore rose from his chair, letting it scrape silently across the floor.

"Have you told anyone else?"

Kingsley shook his head. "They've been busy. As far as the ministry knows, I've got a big lead on his case and wanted to follow it personally." Dumbledore chuckled.

"Funny how easily the truth misleads…I suppose we could try to talk to him." Kingsley followed Dumbledore to the cellar door. The locks slid back with what should have been low, solid clicks, but was instead a disturbing silence, and the door swung back on creakless hinges. The pale sliver of human behind it stepped back out of the way and dropped a battered, cobwebby paving stone to the floor with no dusty clack. It was almost hard to believe it had landed at all.

"Sirius—" began the headmaster, but the man had already sprung towards him like a feral animal, collided with a shield charm, and collapsed, sprawled half on the landing and half head-first down the stairwell, chest heaving.

"There's no need to attack us Sirius, we mean you no harm."

For a moment, Dumbledore was sure he hadn't heard, or couldn't understand. Then, still trembling and staring up into nothingness, he spoke.

"I've always been hurting people, Albus." he said in a low, emotionless rasp. "Good people. Honest people. Innocent. Young… All night… every night… every hour… every day." he raised himself up on one elbow, his movements stiff and puppet-like, looked Dumbledore in the eye for the first time, and whispered, "Why should I stop now?"

"Keep watch on the door for a minute, would you, Kingsley?" said Dumbledore as he walked back into the kitchen. "I know he doesn't look like he's up to much, but you never know…" Dumbledore then took the second cup of tea, considered for a moment the milk and the sugar, and settled on a splash of firewhiskey. "I suppose it's just as well I make it the way he usually takes it."

"…minus the tea." Kingsley added quietly.

"Let's not speak ill of the dimensionally displaced…" Dumbledore chided, and placed the tea on the landing inside the cellar door where a recently-vanished paving stone had been.

"What do you think's happened to Sirius," Kingsley asked as they closed and re-locked the cellar door. "and who do you think this is?"

Albus briefly explained the nature of the archway in the department of mysteries. "…as for who this is, as you may have guessed, he is Sirius Black, but different. Until, if ever, he is fit for sensible conversation, we can only guess what difference lead to him becoming a death eater, but we should, regardless, do for him what we can. Common human decency aside, he will be essential if we ever hope to bring Sirius back."

"And Sirius…"

Dumbledore's expression darkened. "It is probably best not to dwell on his fate, but I'm going to tell you bluntly what has likely happened. He will have once again found himself on the wrong end of another man's crimes, and this time, he won't even know what it is he's supposed to have done. To him, it will be as though every one of us turned on him all at once. For all we know, Kingsley, you've already killed him."

***

"Headmaster!" Minerva McGonigal gasped as she turned the final corner of the spiral staircase. "When I was rudely awakened in the wee hours of the morning by the sounds of a raucous party, I expected it to be the _students!_"

Everyone who had been congregated around the headmaster's desk jumped guiltily and looked round to face the deputy headmistress as the deck they had been using to play exploding snap went off in their hands.

"Oh, bugger, I had a great hand…" Tonks fumed.

"Miss Tonks, you are supposed to be at St. Mungo's—and Mr. Shacklebolt! Dumbledore, this has got to be the most ridiculous thing I have ever…" she stopped to glare at Tonks, who was snickering into the back of her hand. "Is something amusing you, Miss Tonks? And… goodness, Remus, not you too!" Remus, though he wasn't laughing, had the unmistakable look of a man who was trying very hard not to.

"Come on, then," said Kingsley, apparently to the floor. "It'll be worth the look on her face."

"Now, Minerva, I assure you there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this…" Dumbledore said quickly, but it was too late. Sirius had already pulled himself back into his chair and grinned sheepishly at Professor McGonigal. They caught only snippets of the ensuing verbal explosion, but as it wound down, it sounded something like: "…ONLY TO FIND YOU PLAYING CARDS WITH THIS SORRY EXCUSE FOR A HUMAN BEING AS IF THERE WAS NOTHING EVEN REMOTELY OUT OF ORDER! _THIS IS THE MAN WHO LACERATED YOUR INTESTINES!_"

At which point she had to pause and catch her breath, while Kingsley and Sirius exchanged glances. There were no hard feelings between them, but Sirius had earned himself a dirty look when he had offered the Auror a triangle sandwich.

"Now, Minerva," Dumbledore said calmly, "I told you we had a perfectly good explanation. Would you like to hear it?"

Minerva sighed resignedly and sank into a nearby armchair.

***

Minerva looked gravely from Dumbledore to Shacklebolt. "Is there no chance of mistaking it, Headmaster? A curse? A trick? An imposter?" Dumbledore shook his head.

"There is always mistaking anything, Minerva, but of this, I am fairly certain. We'll move him into one of the empty towers as soon as term lets out…"

"Headmaster, are you sure this is wise?" asked Minerva. "Looking at this realistically, the best Sirius could hope for is to have been killed, but he's in all likelihood gone back to—"

"All the more reason" said Dumbledore firmly "for us to try. Even disregarding the off chance that any of us have listened to Sirius, let alone believed him, the man who replaced him needs our help just as much as any other man."

Minerva looked for a moment at the Headmaster and said "You know, Dumbledore, if Black can get within earshot of you, there might be hope for him yet. You're a pushover."

Albus smiled. "Call it what you like."


	6. 6: The 142nd Staircase

6

The 142nd Staircase

Minerva looked from Dumbledore to Black and back again. "Assuming…" she said stiffly, "that you are correct, and that I believe you," she shot Sirius a thin-lipped glare, "we are left harboring a fugitive Death Eater on Hogwarts grounds."

"I'm not a—"

"Beyond, that, Albus, it is not my place to meddle in your private affairs, but I must say, the St. Mungo's staff might be less than pleased when they find you've kept two of their patients up at all hours. Good night."

Dumbledore sighed and rose. "Yes, I suppose Professor McGonigal is right." They said their goodbyes as Remus, Kingsley, and Tonks disappeared into the floo. "Sirius," said Snape after they had gone, "I hope we can overcome whatever differences we might have where you come from." and held out his hand. "You should know how much of a change the difference between two realities can make in a man." Sirius took it uncertainly and nodded.

"We can try."

"Goodnight, Headmaster." Said Severus, and disappeared down the spiral staircase.

"You have no idea how strange that is." Said Sirius, after Snape had left.

"Oh, I just might." Said Dumbledore, and looked at Sirius pointedly. "Now, Sirius, I can't in good conscience lock you up somewhere or force you to stay, but you do have both Voldemort and the Ministry looking for you. You are welcome to stay at Hogwarts, and we can sort out a way to get you back to your world, but if you do I will have to ask you to make yourself scarce, at least until the end of term comes and the students go home."

"I'll do my best."

"You can stay in the old Astronomy tower, it's—"

"In the east corner, at the top of the stairs. The top of all the stairs. I've been."

"It should be comfortable enough, and there isn't much risk of running into a student…"

Sirius nodded and turned to go. "Oh," he said suddenly "And thanks for believing me. Things could have gone a lot worse than they did."

"Think nothing of it, Sirius Black. Things can always have gone a lot worse."

***

The group gathered around the kitchen table at number 12 Grimmauld place found themselves blanketed in a quiet gloom. They had met that afternoon for the first general discussion of Sirius' situation, though by the time the meeting had started, the rumor had already spread to most of the Order. Some of them had stayed for supper out of habit, but any attempts at conversation felt forced and unnatural. Everyone's gaze drifted unconsciously to either the cellar door or to an unopened letter that someone had left in the middle of the table, to Sirius from Harry.

Suddenly, Remus dropped his spoon into his unfinished soup and began filling an extra bowl.

"Remus, what are you--?" Molly asked, looking up in surprise.

"For Sirius." he said, with entirely too little edge to his voice for anyone else's comfort, and left for the cellar.

"He's not exactly 'Sirius' anymore, Remus." Tonks said dully and cut open her roll with slightly more vigor than was necessary. Remus walked back into the kitchen and sat down before he answered.

"Whoever he is, Tonks, his name is still 'Sirius'."

They sat in uncomfortable silence for a few minutes. Arthur coughed. "How is he?" he asked.

"Oh, you know." said Remus, "Huddled in some dusty corner. Growled at me when I opened the door." he raked his fingernails along his scalp and clenched a fistful of his graying hair, his composure seeming to melt before their eyes. "Harry is not going to take this well."

***

The group gathered around the kitchen table at the Burrow stared after the headmaster in silent shock, then, just as he disappeared into the fireplace, exploded with noise.

"Please!" shouted Arthur over the din, "One at a time, and we can talk this over!"

"_Dad!"_ Fred countered, "Did you even see what that nutter did to Harry?"

"…walking free in the school!" said Molly.

"Molly! Fred!" said Arthur, and then sat back down. "Thank you. Now, we can either talk this over, or we can't, but I won't stand for a twelve-way shouting match in this house."

As it turned out, they couldn't.

***

The East tower was the tallest tower in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. It consisted of a single circular room perched at the top of a narrow spiral staircase that came to an end at rickety wooden ladder. The room had long since been abandoned and Astronomy classes moved to the aptly-renamed Astronomy tower. The shape and size of the room leant it a claustrophobic feel when more than a few people gathered inside it for a class, and the rooftop above it, accessible by yet another ladder, was a bit too close to the stars for anyone's comfort. Students had, in its years of use, been frequently struck with vertigo every Wednesday at midnight, and more often than not, classes had been canceled due to high winds.

Sirius had been understandably uneasy when he had heard where he would be staying for the last days of term, but in the end it was not the view out the windows or the way the entire structure seemed to creak and sway when he made any sudden movements that got to him, but the idea that he was literally the furthest possible distance from anyone else in the entire school. The last night of term found Sirius on his back across the low wall surrounding the stargazing roof. To his right was a fall hundreds of feet down, interrupted, if he was lucky, by the safety spells built in with the castle. Interrupted, if he was not lucky, by the roof of what was probably the little-used ballroom, still hundreds of feet down. Sirius preferred to keep his eyes skyward and not think about it.

He didn't know how long he had been sitting before he got the unshakable feeling that he was not quite alone. He looked over to the ladder. "Albus?" he called uncertainly. Dumbledore was the only other person who had been in the tower as far as Sirius knew. He climbed down from the rooftop in time to hear the trapdoor fall back into place, but the ladder below it was keeping no secrets- the person had to have been climbing into the room. Someone or something was with him, and invisible. The thought had barely crossed his mind before he transformed into his animagus form.

It took milliseconds, then, for yet another familiar scent to smack him across the nose and send his mind reeling as he untransformed. "_Harry?_"

His godson—rather, the person who most closely correlated to the person who would have been his godson, had the world not been an unrecognizable mess, backed away from him and into a shelf of old telescopes, at which point he pulled off his invisibility cloak, his wand already trained on Sirius.

"What are you doing here?" Harry demanded, still backing away along the curved wall of shelves.

"Harry, calm down," said Sirius, "I don't even have a wand with me, and I wouldn't attack you if I did."

"Oh, yeah," said Harry, glancing at his recently-healed midriff, "I'll just take your word for it. _Lumos._ Now," he had reached the side of the room opposite Sirius and began to cross towards him. "open that trap door."

Sirius shrugged, and complied. "Harry, I appreciate the effort, but you're doing this all wrong."

"_What?_"

"You see," said Sirius, "Assuming you're trying to uphold justice, and I'm trying to flee the law…" he dropped down through the trapdoor and onto the staircase below, then called back up through the trap door. "…I've got the tactical advantage. I control the exits."

Harry stuck his head down through the trap door, followed by his wand, and squinted down at Sirius. "You haven't…" Harry spun around and climbed down the ladder. "…got some crazy twin brother somewhere, with a penchant for cutting curses?"

"Sort of."

"Besides that, though," said Harry, "I wasn't so much as upholding justice as I was trying to save my… hang on, where are we going?"

"I assumed you were marching me off to McGonigal's office at wand point."

Harry scoffed. "If it's this easy, it probably doesn't matter."

"Come on, I've had a slow day."

AN: Thanks again to reviewers! Even if you've already reveiwed a chapter, please drop me a word to let me know if you're still reading.


	7. 7: Idle Minds

7

Idle Minds

Albus Dumbledore entered the cellar at Number 12 Grimmauld place with half-hearted caution. He found it hard to act as though their guest posed any real threat, but he knew better than to underestimate his enemies.

"Sirius," he said as he searched out the darkest, most miserable corners that the man seemed to gravitate towards, "term has ended and the students have gone home, so I'm going to take you with me back to Hogwarts. We should be able to find some more comfortable accommodations there..." Albus found him and laid one end of an old umbrella against his bare hand. They disappeared together in a glow of blue, and reappeared in the recently cleaned and converted East tower room.

"Yes, this should do nicely," he went on, "bit of light and fresh air… I know it's not very pleasant for everyone, but I've always had a fondness for the place…" he left Sirius where he had landed and crossed to the trap door. "The house-elves or I will come up with your meals, so feel free to let us know if you'd like anything. Some reading material… deck of cards…" Albus glanced back at Sirius. He hadn't said a word since their first meeting, but Dumbledore had yet to decide weather he was lost to reality or simply ignoring him.

"I haven't been able to find anything that would help get you back home, in case you were curious," he said as he climbed down the ladder, "but I'll be giving it plenty of attention, and I'm sure I'll come up with something… " the trap door fell into place behind him and rattled slightly as the protective spells on it activated. Sirius didn't notice. He was preoccupied. He was preoccupied with a lot of things.

It could be argued that some things had preoccupied him for so long that they didn't so much preoccupy him as they did become him, but today, he was preoccupied with something new. Something had fallen into his line of sight and filtered in through his murky consciousness. Something bright. Something warm. He stared at it for a very long time. He couldn't quite recall what it was for.

***

After the students had left on the Hogwarts express and most of the staff had apparated home, Dumbledore invited Sirius to join him with the remaining staff (which included only himself and Hagrid) for dinner.

"If yeh're sure about him, sir." said Hagrid upon hearing this. "But yeh should've seen the ruckus at the Order meeting after yeh'd left…"

"Have I caused ruckus?" Sirius asked as he entered the staffroom. "Sorry about that. Hello again, Albus. Hagrid." he turned to the half-giant with a relieved grin and received a shoulder-wrenching handshake.

"I suppose yeh already know me, if yeh've gone ter Hogwarts." he said gruffly. Sirius nodded.

"Been in the Order with you too…" Hagrid looked skeptical. Sirius meanwhile, had been struck with a thought. "Hagrid, you haven't got a hippogriff named Buckbeak, have you? It's a bloody weird place here; I never know what's going to have changed…" he trailed off as Hagrid sat heavily at the staffroom table.

"Aye," he said somberly. "Had a hippogriff named Buckbeak. Got into a spot o' bother with the Ministry a couple years back."

"Oh…I'm sorry." Sirius found himself unexpectedly gutted to hear that the hippogriff had been executed. "This would sound strange to anyone but you, Hagrid," Sirius took his place opposite the gamekeeper "but that hippogriff and I were rather close…" Sirius paused to consider. "Are rather close, I guess you could say." The thought that Buckbeak was alive in another reality did little for the shock.

"He was a fine hippogriff, he was." Hagrid nodded.

There was little now that could stop Sirius and Hagrid from hitting it off. The gamekeeper found it difficult to see a cold-hearted killer in a grown man who got choked up over the death of a hippogriff.

"Yeh know," said Hagrid, after they had worked their way through most of the meal, "The forest gets a mite unruly this time of year. An extra pair of hands out there with a feel for magical creatures wouldn't go unappreciated. Yeh interested?"

Sirius tried not to look too relieved. "Of course I'll help out. I haven't exactly got anything else to do. Though, I should warn you, I don't know much about anything that isn't a hippogriff." Hagrid waved it off.

"If yeh can do hippogriffs, I can't see anything else givin' yeh much trouble."

"And I don't have a wand."

"I get by without one."

Hagrid then ran down a list of all the things that would be posing a direct risk to the wellbeing of the forest by tomorrow. Sirius' enthusiasm grew in direct proportion to the danger. Albus breathed a silent sigh of relief. He knew it would take him a while to study reality-breeching, and Sirius Black did not strike him as a man who idled well.

***

Several days had passed since Sirius had been moved to the near-empty castle, and Albus found the climb up the East tower getting a little bit longer every time. He made a point of seeing the man at least once every day, partially out of courtesy, partially out of genuine concern for the man's mental health, and partially because the theories rattling around in his brain regarding where this Sirius had gone wrong where the Sirius he knew had not were becoming something of a nuisance, and the only hope he had of putting any of them to rest lay in the alternate Sirius Black.

Unfortunately, Sirius' silence remained unbroken except for every so often, when he would scream. Only for a few seconds, and only when he was asleep. Beyond that, he just stared ahead blankly. Albus paused at the ladder at the top of the stairs and massaged his temples. He really hated Dementors. He really, _really_ hated Dementors. He steeled himself and began to climb. Very little could have prepared him for what he found.

Someone—and Dumbledore could hardly believe it had been the lethargic shell of a man he had been looking after for the past few days—had dragged the unslept-in four poster bed to the back of the room and turned it on its side. On top of that they had stacked the empty shelves, all of it leading up to the trap door to the stargazing roof, which had been left open, midday sunlight pouring through.

Albus set down the tray of food, drew his wand, and climbed up the makeshift ladder. He found at the top, lying on his back on the low stone wall and looking especially ghastly in the light of day, the only person he possibly could have found. It still managed to surprise him.

"Sirius," he said, silently renewing the castle's safety spells, "what are you doing up here?" There was a pause where Dumbledore forgot that he wasn't going to answer. Then, just to round off Dumbledore's five minutes of ridiculously improbable things, he did.

"Fancied a bit of sunlight." he said simply, neither moving nor opening his eyes. He paused for nearly half a minute in which Dumbledore had nothing at all to say, and then went on. "Albus, why are you doing this?"

"Doing what, Sirius?" Sirius cracked half an eyelid and still managed to give Dumbledore what was unmistakably a contemptuous glare.

"You're no good at playing dumb, Albus. Why aren't I back in Azkaban?"

"Sirius, something rather strange has happened, and I'm not sure I can—"

"If Severus put you up to this, you might as well tell me. It's not as if I can do anything to him now."

Dumbledore sat in thoughtful silence, and then rose. "I've left your lunch in the Astronomy classroom, Sirius, but I'm afraid I have to leave now." he waited for a moment, and then lowered himself onto the shelves below.

"Are you going to block this off?" Sirius asked as Albus considered his path down the shelves.

"No," Dumbledore said eventually. "I can't see any reason to. Though I think I'll get you a ladder…"

"Thank you." said Sirius, only almost too quietly for Dumbledore to hear.


	8. 8: Old Friends and Bad Dreams

8

Old Friends and Bad Dreams

_Dark. Cold. A tiny, thankless world. He knew he would forget. He couldn't even remember what it was that he was going to forget. That was the worst part. Or was it? He couldn't remember._

_ He was somewhere else now, but not really, because he could never leave._

"_Have one of your cousins do, it, Bellatrix…" said a high, blood-chilling hiss. "They're much too soft." _

"_Yes, my lord." replied another voice, quiet. Disappointed._

_ "Don't look so sad, Bella," said someone else, in a low, silky drawl. "If Black can't do it, you can have them both."_

_ He paced, cold sweat dripping down the back of his neck. He wanted to vomit. Run away. Die. Bellatrix was torturing him. He had failed. But he wasn't—he hadn't. He couldn't. This time, he was the one holding the wand._

_The man watched him pace with dark, beady eyes. An Auror. A doomed man. He acted as if he found himself captured by death eaters every day._

_ "_Crucio._" _

_ His wand and his voice were shaking._

_ The man didn't even flinch. _

_ "Looks like you picked the wrong profession, boy." he growled. Sirius jumped. They weren't supposed to talk. It was bad enough when they didn't. And they didn't. So many times to come, they wouldn't. They would just scream._

_ But this one wouldn't. He needed to. He needed him to. His master was waiting. Listening. His master. His stomach squirmed._

_He stood with his brother and his best friend and pledged his loyalty. He extended his unmarred forearm for the last time. _

_ It burned. Everything burned. There were children inside. Screaming. The Dark Mark twisted in the sky. He walked away._

_ He couldn't walk away this time. Not with his life. For a moment, he wasn't sure he wanted to. But he wasn't the only one who wouldn't walk away from this if he failed. They still mattered to him._

_ He was no traitor._

_ No hero._

_ No martyr._

_ He stared down at the man who would not scream._

_ Cutting curses. _

_ He didn't have to feel them to perform them._

_ Or maybe it just didn't matter if he did. Because he did. Every time. Just not the way he was supposed to._

_ "_Sectumsempra."

_He screamed. For hours. Fingertip to shoulder. Centimeter by centimeter._

_ It was the first time he had made a man scream like that. _

_It would not be the last. They screamed with him. They never stopped. Screams did that. They lingered. _

_Someone didn't want to hear the screaming any more. It was him—it was always him, but this time, it was also someone else. Someone foreign._

Sirius opened his eyes. Someone was with him. Standing at the trap door, gasping for breath, with a shattered tray of food at his feet and a wand in his hand. Sirius realized who it was and laughed, short, harsh, and bitter. "I thought I told you to stay out of my head."

He rose, walked over to the other man, and took a loud, contemplative bite out of a fallen apple. "You look like shit, Sev." he said blandly. Severus' hand tightened around his wand. "Just because I can count the number of times I've showered in the past fifteen years on one hand doesn't mean you—"

Some vague manifestation of hatred pulsed around Severus and threw Sirius into the wall behind him.

"You're not the one who should be angry here, _Sev._" he snarled "Not after what you did to me."

Severus stepped back towards the trap door, which shot open of its own accord with a loud, echoing bang. "First of all, Black," he said, making sure every syllable held enough hatred to kill a small animal, "you are in an alternate reality from the one you know. Anything you think you know or think has happened has probably changed. Secondly, if you so much as _consider_ calling me that one more time I will ensure, personally, that it is the last thing you ever say." And with a flutter of black robes and another loud bang, he disappeared into the trap door.

"Ah, Severus," said Dumbledore, who had been standing at the bottom of the ladder listening intently for signs of anything that would require his intervention, "Come, walk with me, tell me how it went."

"Wait a minute," Sirius's voice came, muffled and slightly distorted, from behind the trap door. "You can't say something like that and then just _leave_!"

"I would tell you to watch me, Black, but there seems to be something—"

"Now, Severus, Sirius, please." Said Dumbledore, "I'll be back by lunchtime—" something heavy and solid was thrown against the trap door "—to explain everything I can. In the meantime, Sirius, please don't start that again. Silencing charms give a place such a gloomy feel."

They had reached the bottom of the East tower before Albus thought Severus looked calm enough for any reasonable communication.

"He was asleep when I entered, Headmaster." Severus explained "Deeply, and fitfully. I preformed Leglimency." Albus clucked disapprovingly.

"I don't think I need to tell you how dangerous that could have been…"

"Forgive me, Headmaster. Curiosity got the better of me." And indeed, it had. It was not very widely known, (just like everything else about Severus, if he had anything to say about it) but Severus Snape did not dream. He found it difficult to resist any opportunity he had to peer into the dreams (and nightmares) of others.

"No harm done, I suppose. What did you see?"

Severus hesitated. "It was…somewhat unsettling."

"That man has been in Azkaban for much of his life, Severus. Of course his nightmares are unsettling."

And Severus told him, as far as he could decipher, what he had seen.

***

In some ways, Sirius Black was like a man having a fling with his wife's twin sister while his wife was out of town. In other, more admirable ways, he was like a man falling in love with his wife's twin sister after his wife had gone missing and been presumed dead, and every other woman in the world had spontaneously combusted. It was somewhat strange and somewhat disloyal, and there was always the possibility that he would get back to the original, but until then, he could hardly be blamed for finding friends in familiar faces, and he didn't have much choice in the matter anyway.

He was closer to Hagrid and on better terms with Dumbledore than he had ever been in his normal life, and, spending most of his time either caring for or fighting off magical wildlife of some kind, he was having one of the best summers of his life. Any thoughts that he had left everyone he cared about with a raving death-eater version of himself for company had been pushed neatly into the back of his mind, which he had long made a habit of avoiding.

After a little over a week working in the forest and around the grounds, Hagrid passed on a proposition.

"We're all a bit tired of havin' things get inter a mess over weather or not yeh should be tossed inter Azkaban," he explained as they dug up a plant that needed moving, "So Arthur Weasley an' Dumbledore talked it over, an' figured, if yeh're willing, that yeh should have yer own say in the argument. Might jus' put things inter a bigger mess, o' course…" Sirius agreed to come immediately.

"I actually had a meeting like this before," he explained "After the Order reformed for the second war. You know… 'He's a nasty death eater,' 'No, I'm not a nasty death eater,' 'If you trust Dumbledore you trust him,' that sort of thing. I wonder if the sides will be the same this time around..."

"Well, yeh can trust Moody ter make this one interestin' enough. He's bin waitin' fer yeh ter off me all week."

Unfortunately the plant they were digging up, which was large, purple, fernlike, poisonous to the touch, and encroaching on the neatly kept grounds, had spiny and extremely aggressive roots that Hagrid had neglected to mention. It took them the rest of the day to get it back into the forest and when they finally got to the Order meeting, they were fifteen minutes late, and not especially well-received.

AN: Weird dream sequence, hope that worked out alright =/

But yah, in case you can't tell from my crappy pacing and short chapters, I'm just as eager to get to the interesting parts as anyone reading this.


	9. 9: Mostly 'Armless

9

Mostly 'Armless

Sirius stumbled out of the Weasley family's fireplace and into a roomful of the unique silence created when a person abruptly stops talking about someone else because that someone else has just entered the room. It is not the sort of silence that can be broken delicately, and Sirius knew better than to try. Thankfully, Hagrid squeezed out of the fireplace not a moment later, coughing, soot-covered, bent double to accommodate the mantle (which he still managed to dislodge from the wall on the way out), and saved Sirius the trouble.

"Righ' then," he said cheerily, addressing what appeared to be (and nearly was) the entire Order of the Phoenix, all seated at or standing near the magically expanded kitchen table. "This here, as yeh've probably guessed, is Sirius Black." Before anyone could respond, someone very far upstairs shouted down to them.

"Mum, are they here yet?"

"Ronald get back in your room this instant!" Molly Weasley shouted back.

"We just wanted to grab some food before they—"

"NOW!"

"Dad, tell Mum this is ridiculous." Said another voice.

"George, this is not--!"

"We're _in _the Order, Mum we're not—"

"FRED!"

"—kids anymore!" And, after some silent call to revolution, Fred and George Weasley bounded down the stairs.

"Mum, did you just let Fred and George come down?" Ginny, this time.

"I most certainly did not!" she shouted, shooting a glare fierce enough to make a basilisk slither away in shame at her youngest present sons, who joined the rest of the Order at the table.

"You know we had to come." said Fred.

"We've got to make a judgment for ourselves." said George.

"He's either addled Harry's brains--"

"---and we need to hex him senseless,"

"or he's found a way into the Lost Ballroom--"

"--and we'd like to shake his hand."

They then turned together and stared expectantly at Sirius. Harry had told them all about his bizarre meeting with the not-Death-Eater, and how Sirius had, on their way to McGonigal's office, made a few unnecessarily fantastic detours into the less well-known parts of the castle. Among them, and perhaps most memorable of them, had been an extravagant Ballroom without any doors.

"Now that we're all accounted for," Arthur said slowly, almost as if he was waiting for someone else to interrupt, "I think we can get on with the meeting. Dumbledore is away at the moment, but he has already given his position on the matter at hand, which is..." he glanced at Sirius as three fleshy-colored yarn-like strands descended unnoticed from the stairwell, "well, a consideration of the motives, nature, and trustworthiness of Sirius Black..."

***

Harry Potter lay on his stomach in his bed at Number 4, Privet Drive and wished, not for the first time, but perhaps the most fervently, that magic (and life in general, as long as he was wishing) was a little less complicated.

Until the end of his final exams, Harry had been having a horrible year. Between the nightmares when he was awake, (The ones with greasy hair, toad faces, and evil pink souls.) and the ones when he was asleep, (The ones with doors and snakes and his loved ones being killed.) and being tricked into doing something stupid by one of the most powerful Dark Wizards of all time, he had been glad to get on the outbound Hogwarts express. He had a summer of not being periodically possessed to look forward to. He would write his friends, do his homework in the dark, and get sick to the teeth of his muggle life before the week was out. Things had been looking up.

Then his old Defense against the Dark Arts professor had shown up out of the blue, made him some tea, looked generally grave and troubled, and told him that his godfather had fallen into a parallel reality—a parallel reality where Sirius Black was actually a Death Eater, and they weren't quite sure how to get him out again. He had left him then, with his sincerest condolences, and a book.

The book was a crumbling black text from the Hogwarts library. The title "Reality Breaching: Infinite Impossibilities" was written in silver letters barely legible for age and abuse, and it looked as if the book had been more than once put to use as a cauldron trivet.

He was reading it now, as he had been for nearly every waking and not otherwise occupied hour of his summer—or at least, he was trying to. The book frequently dissolved into Arithmancy and Astrology and Ancient Runes so deeply and arbitrarily intertwined that Harry couldn't help but wonder if even the researchers had had any idea what they were talking about. When the streetlamps of Privet Drive came on for the night and he decided to give up on whatever sentence he had been working at all day, he flipped back to one particular diagram on one particular page, as he had done many times before, and stared at it.

It was the veiled archway from the Department of Mysteries. Every detail, every stone, from the texture of the cloth to the shape of the room. Harry didn't care about the flow of ambient magic, or the mythological creature that fled realities as a natural defense mechanism which could be theoretically caught using a tricky bit of time travel, (because you needed to know where it was going to be before it was there) and then woven into veil-cloth. He understood it better than most of the rest of the book, but still he did not care. What he cared about was that despite the books' insistence that reality breaching was best left to half-mad Arithmancy professors and unemployed philosophers—best left to quietly rot away in the halls of the theoretical and the impossible, there was, deep in the Department of Mysteries, one tiny shred of reality to it all.

It was through this unlikely shred of reality that Sirius had fallen, and it was through this shred of reality that Harry would get him back again.

***

It was not long before the owls in the Burrow had flown off in search of more peaceful roosts, and the underage wizards and witch on the top floor landing found themselves holding their extendable ears several inches from their faces. They could hear quite well enough without them.

In the kitchen, Alastor Moody swung his staff over his head like an axe and brought it down on the table only inches from George Weasley's right elbow with a deafening crack.

"Blimey, Mad-Eye!" he yelped as the rest of the house fell into startled silence. "I'm rather attached to that elbow…"

"Constant vigilance, Weasley. So was I." Moody growled back. "Now, we've got more important things to do than to debate the ethics of the crimes of an alternate reality. There's probably an alternate reality where Albus Dumbledore is a Death Eater and I'm the bloody Prime Minister. We don't have to deal with them, we don't have to talk about them—I don't want you to even _think _about them until we've got this settled. The point is that we've got him" he jabbed his staff towards Sirius "here now, and we need to come to an agreement as to what he is. I think we've accepted that he is not the Death Eater we fought in the first war and in the Department of Mysteries. I can even say that he's from an alternate reality, but after that, who is he that we can trust?"

Moody eyed them all carefully, two at a time, and settled both eyes once more on Sirius. "He's met us. Claims he knows us. I can even grant that he's been in the Order, but I'll tell you where else he's been." he leaned across the table towards Sirius "Some places never leave a man, Black, and you…You are most intimately acquainted with the inside of Azkaban."

"I've already told you that," said Sirius coldly, "and I've already told you why."

"Do you really think," he went on as if he hadn't heard "that we would let a loyal Order member rot in Azkaban?"

"Yeh think people don't ever make mistakes, Mad-Eye?" said Hagrid, an uncommon edge to his tone.

"What if he really was the Potter's secret keeper?" Moody said, pacing around the table now. "What if he really did kill Pettigrew? _And what about that leak in the Order?_"

Sirius looked up curiously. "We never had a leak. Not in the second war."

"That's been going on since the beginning, Mad-Eye," said Arthur "He wasn't even here."

"This is getting ridiculous." Said Remus. "If someone were going to impersonate someone to infiltrate the Order, I don't think they would go for a convicted Death Eater."

"No, you're right Remus—" said Sirius, "Bung me your wand, would you Tonks?" the pink-haired witch shrugged and handed it over. A clock—presumably, the normal one in the house, began to strike ten. Moody glared at Sirius dangerously and began to unscrew the lid on his hip flask. "If someone were going to infiltrate the Order, they would impersonate someone reputable. Like a teacher." He leveled the wand at Moody. "Or an Auror. _Expelliarmus!_"

Moody's hip flask flew to one corner of the room and his wand to the other. The entire order had jumped out of their chairs, and Sirius found himself with seventeen very well practiced wands drawn on him and at least three people pinning his arms behind his back.

"Wait, please!" said Sirius "Give me five minutes, maybe less, I can—"

"You just attacked an Auror, Black." Said Tonks, reclaiming her wand and pointing it at his chest. "You don't even get _one. Stupefy._"

AN: Please forgive the tasteless chapter title =P


	10. 10: A Glaring Continuity Error

10

A Glaring Continuity Error

"Well, I feel a bit stupid."

"Tell me about it."

"Come on, then, let's wake him up…"

"_Enervate!"_

"—I can explain everything!" Sirius gasped.

"We were hoping you could." said Remus apologetically. Sirius felt someone haul him to his feet as his vision came back into focus. Sprawled on the floor before them, in Alastor Moody's now-oversized clothes and where Alastor Moody had until very recently been standing, was a man who, if nothing else, was not Alastor Moody. He clawed desperately at his shoulder where Moody's fake arm pinned his real one to his side, his eyes darting from face to face and wand to wand. Alastor Moody's fake eye swiveled aimlessly across the floor

"Polyjuice potion." Said Severus from off in the corner. The man on the floor stopped struggling as a spark of comprehension and a strange approximation of a Moody grimace flickered across his young, unscarred face.

"You see," he growled (in a voice that was not very well suited for growling, and sounded far more like a teenager whose voice had not quite stopped changing) "We go around trusting the likes of him, and _none of us _is safe." He pushed himself up from the floor, one-armed, and stood, practically daring any of them to stop him. For a half-barefoot man with arms that fell several centimeters short of his sleeves, he was surprisingly menacing. "Kingsley!" he barked, "Get me my wand. Let's try and find out who this lunatic's turned me into and—"

"Wait." said a low, gravelly, and instantly recognizable voice from the corner of the room. The color drained from the imposter's face. It was Moody, clutching at the wall for balance with his one hand, his black robes straining against his bulky frame. "I checked the potion." he explained, "Whoever he looks like," he inclined his head towards the man in Moody's clothes. "He is." Moody hopped carefully over to the fireplace, leaving one of Severus Snape's shoes behind. "And he looks like Bartemis Crouch Jr." he said, and threw some floo powder on the embers before anyone could react. "I'll be contacting the Headmaster and making myself some antidote, if anyone needs me." he explained, before disappearing into the flames.

Everybody but Arthur and Crouch (who were busy threatening or being threatened by each other, respectively) turned to Sirius.

"I think," Kingsley prompted "you had something to tell us, Sirius?"

Sirius nodded and began to explain.

***

Albus Dumbledore contemplated the archway in the Department of Mysteries in silence, a crystal phial of a house elf's memory in his pocket, a comforting triumph, an undelivered letter in his hand, a nagging defeat. He had stopped by (here meaning 'snuck in') to look at the veil for the first time today. Perhaps, in his flurry of self-confidence brought on by the fruits of his earlier labors, he had thought that the archway might give him some answer. Instead, he got nothing but the eerie, incomprehensible whispers of could-have-beens and never-weres. It was the most he should have expected. He looked down at his letter once more.

There was no way to send something into another reality unless there was something for it to replace and something to replace it in turn. In short, only if the other world was trying to contact this one at the exact moment he was trying to contact them could anything at all productive occur, and he doubted that anyone was going to try to make inter-dimensional contact on the word of an escaped Death Eater. He had written a letter explaining everything, but the only way they would receive the letter, is if they already knew what he was trying so hard to tell them.

He sighed and tossed his letter into the veil. It had been more out of his desire to throw something than out of his expectation that something would come of it, but come of it something did. Something small, square, and parchment-like, that flew back at him out of the veil as if in retaliation for his own disrespect and skidded across the stone floor. With a flick of his wand, it flew into his hand. It was addressed to him. It was clearly from him. He had never seen it before in his life.

He tucked the letter away in his pocket and walked out of the Ministry building through the way most people were expected to go in. He whistled a quiet sea chantey and wished the Aurors and security guards a pleasant evening as he passed. Albus was not often overly self-congratulatory, but tonight, he could not help but remind himself that not for nothing was he considered the greatest Wizard of all time.

***

Mundungus Fletcher pulled an invisibility cloak over himself like a blanket and attempted to fall asleep. Unfortunately, the stone thing he was stationed at was making ominous whispering noises, and the stream of identical letters charmed to fly back and forth through the veil were not exactly sheep. He turned over uncomfortably. He was missing an important meeting for this… keeping watch over a bunch of flying letters. He had begun to entertain thoughts of leaving the letters to look after themselves, when one of them fell out of the air and shot across the floor.

He picked it up. He couldn't tell whether it was the same as all the other letters, but Dumbledore had said to tell him if anything at all happened. This, he decided, was exactly the anything he had been waiting for, and disappeared under the invisibility cloak once more.

***

Albus Dumbledore stood sat at his desk, rolling a recently-acquired phial of memory between his fingers. He was eager to see it, but knew, as he locked the tiny bottle in his desk drawer, that falling asleep with his face in his pensive was terrible for his back. The memory would keep. The peaceful night would not. For thirty blissful seconds, Albus had no idea how right he was.

Thirty seconds later, a patronus in the form of a raccoon materialized on his desk, and then another in the form of a doe. He did not bother to contain his weary sigh.

"Well, Severus? Mundungus?" he asked the silvery-white messengers.

"Funny thing 'appened to one of your letters, 'eadmaster." said the raccoon (the only patronus Albus had ever seen that managed to look filthy).

"Thank you, Mundungus. I assume you're on your way?"

"Wouldn't want to interrupt anything. It'll wait, if you—"

"No, not at all." he said airily. "The fire is open and the night is young. Severus?"

"Alastor Moody was being impersonated by a man who died years ago." said the doe. "We have him at the Burrow now."

***

Having returned with no further incident from the Department of Mysteries, Albus Dumbledore leaned back into his desk chair in his silent office and unfolded the letter.

_Dear Albus Dumbledore,_ it began, _or rather, note to self._

Albus smiled. The letter he had sent began exactly the same way.

AN: The appearance of David Tennant's character (I swear, this scene was not conceived in fangirlishness) spawned, much to my surprise, both an allusion to the recent BBC production of Hamlet and a line ripped directly from Doctor Who. Anybody catch them?

On a more on-topic, Harry Potter fandom note, I always thought Barty Jr. deserved a better send-off than he got. I mean, the soul-sucking was a fine, realistic enough way for him to go, but his last scene shows him in a rather poor light for a man who spent a whole school year fooling several highly accomplished people into thinking he was one of their trusted allies/ closest friends. He's smarter than his non-Moody page time gives him credit for.


	11. 11: An Unread Letter and an Undead Man

11

An Unread Letter and an Undead Man

_Dear Albus Dumbledore, _

_or rather, note to self._

_As you have hopefully noticed, a friend of yours and an enemy of mine have been replaced by each other. This caused some confusion, but let me assure you, Sirius Black was not done any irreversible harm._

_Now, regardless of how much we prefer the company of your Sirius Black to our Sirius Black, I am sure you will agree when I say this twist of reality should be rectified as soon as possible. I will be keeping a stream of blank parchment running through the archway at all times, and if you do the same, we will be able to pass messages between our realities. We should be able to coordinate a time for both Sirius Blacks to re-enter the veil and switch back._

_You truly,_

_Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore_

_PS. If this made no sense whatsoever, then I have probably gotten my realities crossed. Please keep the lines clear for the next year or so. Sorry for the inconvenience, but this is going to be quite complicated enough without uninvolved realities popping up._

The letter lay open on the Headmaster's desk. He had tossed it there and gone to bed immensely pleased with himself, in a rather unusual sense of the phrase.

A letter in identical handwriting and with the same post-script, but rather more (and of slightly different tone) in the middle, was folded up in the Headmaster's pocket. He would read it eventually. At the moment, he was busy. He followed Mundungus into his fireplace and stepped out into the Weasley's kitchen.

"…and it sucked out his soul before anyone could stop it." Sirius finished, with what had been conceived as an offhand shrug but came across far more like a shudder. The rest of the Order was listening so intently to whatever he had been talking about that they hardly noticed Albus and Mundungus enter. Albus in turn hardly noticed any of them for the man tied up in the corner, who had died fourteen years ago and was looking remarkably alive for it.

"Barty Crouch Jr…" he said quietly. Barty fixed him with a long, defiant stare from across the room. 'That's me, you old codger.' he seemed to say. 'What of it?'

"This is most curious." he tore his gaze from the not-dead man and conjured himself a chair. The rest of the order had taken notice of his arrival and fallen silent. "I think we can all agree that the first priority is finding Alastor, assuming he is still alive. I can hear the details of this" he indicated Crouch "later. Now, does anyone know anything pertaining to the real Alastor—" several people began to speak, "and where he might be?"

"This already happened in my world, Albus." said Sirius. "And in my world, he was alive and kept in a trunk under the imperius curse, in the Defence Against the Dark Arts office."

"Alastor—rather, Crouch, has been living in Alastor's house since he left Hogwarts." said Dorcas Meadows, to whom Sirius had already apologized for (as far as he could tell) inadvertently causing her death in his native reality. If the situation were examined more closely, they might have realized that it was in fact the ineptitude of the other Sirius' death eating that had prevented her death in this reality, but they didn't care to dwell on it that much.

"Thank you, Dorcas, Sirius. I should be back in a moment. If I'm not, something dreadful has probably happened. Goodbye!" he summoned a large ring of keys from Crouch's belt with a flick of his wand, and ducked back into the fireplace.

AN: Yeah, this is a criminally short chapter after taking…what has it been, two months? Not gunna lie, I completely stopped writing. From here we could do several things. One, I could write one more highly concentrated chapter that will wrap this up very quickly. One and a half, I'll skip to what the last chapter would have been and you can just assume the characters followed a logical course of action to get there. Two, I could keep writing the story as planned and run the risk of this (by which I mean two months) happening again. Three, nothing. The third is the default reaction. Not to be a dirty review-monger, but if nobody responds, nothing is probably what's going to happen, because at this point I don't care about the story enough to write for myself. If I were a reader, I'd go for one and a half (two if it was really balls-to-the-walls good), but this isn't about me and I'm not a reader.

What do you think?


	12. 12: Rationality Adjourned

12

Rationality Adjourned

When Dumbledore returned some time later, having put right the unfortunate misplacement of Alastor Moody, he was forced to deal with two more misplacements. The first was Bartemis Crouch in the Weasley's kitchen. The second was Sirius Black in the Order of the Phoenix. Unfortunately, he was not in the mood to deal with either of them.

"I think," he announced without preamble, "that this situation is as good as it is going to get. If you think that Sirius Black is a menace to our cause, then nothing we say here and now is going to sway you."

His analysis was met with a collective shrug. Moody was the last one who had felt especially strongly either way, and he was clearly a Death Eater. "Which brings us," said Dumbledore, confusing everyone slightly by employing a segway no one else could hear, "to the matter of Crouch."

He drew his wand. "Barty," he said, with enough patience to make a man sick, "Is there anything you wanted to say?"

Crouch said nothing.

"Then, I think I'll have to kill you."

Crouch snickered. "Bluffing," he said quietly.

"Oh am I?" said Dumbledore. A fierce light glinted in his blue eyes and a burst of emerald green shot from the end of his wand. Barty was gone—he had completely vanished, leaving his empty clothes behind. For a moment, everyone was silent. "Yes, actually." Dumbledore went on with a small smile. "Yes I was." He lifted a squirming brown ferret out of Alastor's clothes by the scruff of its neck. Ferrets couldn't exactly glare daggers, but this one did anyway. "I've turned you into a ferret. I know," he tucked the bewildered rodent into one of his robe pockets "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, but a ferret for a ferret makes the whole world ferrets, and I'm not sure that would be such a bad thing anyways." he turned back to the Order.

Most of the members of the Order of the Pheonix had known Albus for all of their adult lives. Many of them had known him longer. As evidenced by their glazed stares, they still hadn't figured him out. "Thank you all for coming tonight," said Albus. "Does anyone have anything further they wish to have addressed?"

"What the hell did you just do, sir?"

Albus gave George a small wink and clapped his hands together, a sort of signal of finality. "Then that's that. I would love to stay longer, but I've a death eater in my pocket. Have a good evening everyone, meeting adjourned." He stepped into the fireplace and disappeared.

Everyone said their goodbyes and filed in soon after, each of them privately deciding that someone had probably had a bit too much to drink, and that it had probably been Dumbledore.

AN: Wrote this on Write or Die because I'm so easily distracted. It probably shows. It's short, but there's another one coming soon. It's just a good place for a chapter break and the next one's going to be long and soon.


	13. 13: Shuffled

13

Shuffled

After initial contact was made, it was a small matter to arrange a time and date for the Siriuses to switch back through the veil. Both Dumbledores arbitrarily suggested the exact same time and date. Until then, things went on very much as they had for the past few days, but with the idea of Sirius taking up permanent residence in the world quite pushed from their minds, everyone was far more relaxed about what they did in the meantime. Soon, it would be someone else's problem.

Remus arrived at Number four Privitt drive late in the evening. To the Dursleys, the difference between having a wizard and a werewolf in their living room was like the difference between having a dead cat and a dead dog in their living room. Harry knew this, and followed Remus out as quickly as possible to head off any polite conversation that might errupt between them. "Harry," said Remus, after they were safely on the Knight bus, "I know you want to see Sirius when he comes back, but we're going to have to take the Other Sirius with us when we do." Harry nodded somewhat solemnly and turned the conversation to lighter things. Quidditch. Voldemort. That sort of thing.

Hagrid, Remus, Severus, and Kingsley all gathered in Dumbledore's office and watched in silence as the man checked one of his many silver instruments. He stared intently at the one that looked the least like a clock and announced that it was almost time. "Don' mean ter intrude, Sir, but what do yeh mean to do with him once 'e's back?" Everyone but Dumbledore glanced involuntarily at the brown ferret sulking in the bottom of a charmed owlcage. At this point, there was no telling what the Headmaster might do with a death eater. Dumbledore stroked his beard ponderously.

"I'm not certain, Hagrid."

"And..." Sirius was still considering the ferret. "What about Crouch?"

"I'm sure I will think of something. Let us be off." he presented them with a disgustingly ornate quill. A portkey. "The Department of Mysteries awaits."

* * *

Harry and Remus got off the bus at Hogsmede and took the Hogshead floo to Dumbledore's office. The last to arrive, they were met there by, to Harry's delighted surprise, Ron, Hermione, much of the Weasley family and a few other members of the Order. Kingsley and Tonks flanked a man in the back of the room. The sight of the man between them made Harry's breath catch uncomfortably. Tonks and Kingsley did not seem especially bothered by the situation, but Harry was not the only one who made a point of not looking at the other Sirius Black.

"Time to go." said Dumbledore, checking the little silver instrument that looked the least like a clock and presenting them with a disgustingly ornate quill. A portkey. "The Department of Mysteries awaits."

The remaining wait time in the chamber itself should have been silent and uneventful. Ron Weasley was not in the mood for silent an uneventful things.

"Hey, Harry."

"Yeah, Ron?"

"Let's go talk to him."

"What?"

"Yeah, come on."

"_Ronald." _That was Hermione.

"Professor Lupin said to be careful, Ron."

"Harry's right. Besides," she took a surreptitious look at the man through the corner of her eye. So far, he hadn't done anything but stare at the ground blankly. "I don't think he'd be worth talking to."

Harry nodded. "Probably went mad in Azkaban."

"Sirius didn't." Ron said, somewhat sulkily.

"It's not a matter of inherit mental constitution." Hermione explained. "Harry's godfather was—"

"You know what this chamber's got?" said a vaguely familiar voice, and he didn't have to say it very loud. "_Excellent acoustics._" Tonks turned away sharply to stifle a snicker, and Sirius Black grinned menacingly at Harry, Ron, and Hermione from across the room. Ron looked mildly triumphant and mildly ill and led them across the room.

Hermione nudged Ron when they got within acceptable speaking distance, but Ron only shrugged. His plan had not gone this far. Kingsley, Tonks, other Sirius, and Moody, who was standing guard at the rear of the small escort, were all looking at them expectantly. "So… erm…" Hermione began, uncertainly. "Mr…" she went slightly pale when she realized Sirius was looking at her and changed conversational directions. "Mr. Moody, may we speak with your prisoner?"

Moody shrugged. "Five minutes before we toss him through."

"Tough to get to know a person in five minutes." Said Sirius.

"We can try. I'm Harry Potter," said Harry Potter, "These are my friends, Ron and Hermione."

"Sirius Black." He looked over the teenagers. He didn't know what would happen on the other side of the veil, and he didn't think it had anything to do with anything that wasn't Azkaban.

"I suppose you're going back to Azkaban." Said Harry, as if he had read Sirius' mind. Hermione visibly winced.

"Probably." Said Sirius.

Dumbledore stood a few feet away, on the dias of the archway, pocketwatch in hand.

* * *

A few feet away from a slightly different him, stood a very different Sirius saying some very different goodbyes. Hagrid had come to see him off, giving him what started as a handshake and ended in a bone-crushing hug. Both of them were slightly teary-eyed; Hagrid because he had grown close to Sirius and knew he would never see him again, Sirius because his ribs were coming close to piercing through his lungs.

The rest of the Order had already fanned out behind them, ready to take on whoever came through the veil in Sirius' place.

"Come now, Hagrid," said Dumbledore, reaching up to pat the giant's arm and leading him to his place in the ranks. "Now, stand beside me, Sirius." He stood, facing the black veil, slightly off center, and Sirius joined him. The whispers were more than audible now. "I'm going to count down from five."

"Five." Sirius realized that he was shaking slightly. Were they even sure this would work?

* * *

"Four." Kingsley and Tonks took ahold of each of Black's arms, and Moody dug his wand in between his shoulderblades. The more he cooperated, the more suspicious they got.

* * *

"Three.

Two.

One."

He stepped through the veil.

* * *

For a moment the air was crowded and alive. Like he had stepped from the inside of a building and off the edge of a cliff and through a spider web three feet thick and it clung to him. When he finally found the ground again, he felt squeamish and cold and he had no inclination to open the eyes he hadn't realized he had closed. Someone was keeping him on his feet.

"Hellfire, Sirius" said a voice, relieved and exasperated and probably not real. It was Sirius' number one most hallucinated voice. It would go away soon. But it kept talking. "You look _terrible_."

"Even for you." Said another. Grinning—he could hear it. Also not real. In his top ten most hallucinated voices.

"Don't they have food in alternate realities?" Also grinning, nearly laughing, but he had never heard that one before. It was a kid. Preteen boy, maybe.

"Come on, you're scaring me." The first voice was slapping him.

"Quit it, James." He pushed the hand away. He didn't like addressing hallucinations, but he also didn't like them slapping him. He opened his eyes. "Persistent little bugger, aren't you." James was still there.

"Always have been." Said James, but there was concern creeping into his voice.

"Oh," said Sirius, catching sight of the second voice. "I've died, haven't I?"

"I should think not, Sirius." Said Dumbledore from behind him.

Sirius dislodged himself from Regulus' grip without much difficulty and crouched to the ground, just below eye-level with the third voice. "I need and objective opinion on this." He said, and was about to quiz the boy on the reality of the situation, when he realized that whoever it was looked rather gloomy. "What's wrong?"

"You're not my dad, are you." Said the boy, phrased as a question, intoned as a statement. Sirius stood up abruptly.

"No. Definitely not." He said. "Sorry."

Dumbledore massaged his temples, a concern that had been niggling at the back of his mind now an undeniable reality.

"Wrong Sirius." Said James wearily, just as the wrong Sirius realized what had happened and grabbed his best friend in a death-grip of a hug. James returned it sadly. "I'll bet I've died." He mused.

"At least we're rid of the chipper one." Said Regulus. Sirius released James and turned away for a moment, having gotten something in his eye.

"He was driving me nuts." Agreed James.

* * *

Sirius stepped out, Tonks, Kingsley, and Moody clearing out of his way. He couldn't imagine what they had been doing that close to the veil, but it didn't matter much. He was back. Harry was alive, and coming to the arch to meet him.

"Harry!" He reached out to grab his godson's shoulder, and missed by three inches. Harry probably hadn't stepped up on the dais yet. Sirius glanced down. He had. There they were on level ground, and there Harry was. Three inches too short. Harry looked rather puzzled as well. Sirius noticed something else. "Harry, where are your parents? And your sister, and Neville? And…" he brushed Harry's bangs away from his forehead. "What did you do to your head?"

* * *

Sirius stepped out of the veil and into a stunner. He was unconscious before he could register how odd it was that he was being held at wand point by the Order of the Phoeninx, three quarters of whom had been dead for years.

* * *

Sirius expected to be hit by something. A stunner, probably. That was usually how the Order worked. What he hadn't expected, among other things, was something small and gentle hitting him around mid-thigh and hugging him around the knees. "Sirius is back!" she exclaimed happily, and he couldn't figure out how to dislodge her without the use of his hands. Fortunately, a red-haired woman came to his aide, and pulled the black-haired girl into her arms.

Lily looked the man over, this time finding it considerably easier to spot the difference than it was to find the resemblance. Under different circumstances, she might not have even guessed it was Sirius. "I'm sorry," she said, "but we've gotten it mixed up again. Have we met before?" The thought seemed odd, a Sirius who didn't even know her, but it looked like that was exactly who they had found. Sirius ignored a flicker of familiarity and shook his head. "In that case," she said brightly, shifting the girl to one hip to extend a hand, "I'm Lily Potter." Sirius twisted his left arm behind his back as far as he could, bringing his right hand into visibility somewhere above his hip. He grinned apologetically.

Lily closed the distance between them and shook his hand regardless. It was, he realized with some surprise, the first time anyone had done so in well over sixteen years. "We'll have to get those off if we're going to have any kind of proper introduction." She said firmly, glancing at the manacles, setting her daughter down, and pulling out her wand. There was a distinct sadness to her now. He could see it in her eyes. _Her eyes. _

"Lily Evans." Sirius realized suddenly. "Severus' friend." _My friend._ He felt a vague, distant pang of something or other. Probably an emotion, but he wasn't sure which.

Lily smiled encouragingly. "We would have gone to school together."

James Potter came onto the dais then, followed closely by two gangly, black-haired teens. One of them was Harry Potter. The other, Neville Longbottom.

* * *

"Albus?" asked James, and Regulus, and Remus, and Tonks. Every Dumbledore conjured a deck of cards. He cut them in the middle, and bridged them back together again "And that," he concluded, "Is what has happened to Sirius Black."

AN: Yes. Because two versions of every character just wasn't confusing enough.

Edited for clarity. I mean, as clear as this is going to get. I put back the asterisks (to denote a reality shift) that got deleted when I uploaded.

And, edited again, because this site doesn't take too kindly to asterisks. My bad.


	14. 14: Proper Introductions

14

Proper Introductions

Everyone continued to stare at Dumbledore blankly. He had been having this effect a lot lately. He set the cards aside. "When, Sirius initially switched places…"

#$^3342f32

"When our Sirius was replaced with another Sirius, we thought there were only two realities involved." The sound of heavy footsteps approaching the chamber prompted him to retrieve his disgustingly ornate quill and offer it to the group. The group here consisted only of himself, the Potters, Neville, and the newly exchanged Sirius. Everyone but Sirius and Lily reached out to touch the portkey.

"I'll need you to…" he glanced at Sirius. "Oh, yes, my apologies. If you could turn around, Sirius."

"Albus, I doubt he could do much harm even if we did free his hands." Lily interjected, as Albus moved the portkey to accommodate Sirius.

Albus glanced from Lily to Sirius."Am I correct to assume" he said, "That some iteration of myself oversaw the exchange at the veil?" Sirius nodded. The quill began to glow blue. Several unspeakables burst through the chamber door. "Well I don't imagine…" the Department of Mysteries spun out of existence around them, eventually settling back into the shape Dumbledore's office, and Dumbledore went on as if it hadn't. "…that I would allow that without good reason."

"Alright, Sirius." Said James, "What's the story? What's Dumbledore's reason?"

Everyone rapidly recovered from the portkey and fell silent.

"I'm a death eater." Said Sirius, in a tone so flat and acceptingly matter-of-fact that for a half-second, everyone forgot to be horrified.

#$dsF643#$g

"We thought," said Albus, sitting slowly on the edge of the stone dias and inviting James and what remained of the Black family to join him. "that their were only two realities involved. There has been an unfortunate mix-up. You see…" James interrupted him.

"We can't stay here, Albus."

"It's about as safe as anywhere," he looked somewhat peeved to have been interrupted. "But I suppose you're right. James, Regulus, standard traveling procedures, meeting place number three." They both gave him a disapproving glance, but Albus waved them off, "Call me nostalgic, but Sirius will probably know where it is no matter who he is. Luke," Albus handed the boy a small bag of hard candies. "End on red. Cherry, not Strawberry. And don't eat-"

"I know, Albus." Luke grinned. "Don't eat the lemon ones." he popped a blue raspberry into his mouth. It probably glowed blue, but it was hard to tell, and then he was gone. Small pops signaled that Regulus and James had immediately followed.

"Sirius—you can apparate, right?"

"Of course."

"Good. Apparate a few places, anywhere you like, and end at your old house. Grimmauld place. Check the mail." And Albus dissapparated.

When Sirius got to Grimmauld place, knowing better than to think about Dumbledore's motives, he found a note in the mailbox directing him to Albus' office. He stared at it, puzzled. Noone could apparate to Hogwarts. He shrugged and tried anyway, and found that it just like apparating anywhere else.

The room was filled with the shadows and sillouhettes of everyone he would have expected to be there, but it was not precisely Hogwarts anymore. Sirius felt his way over to the window, the only source of light in the room. He looked out onto the grounds. "James," he said, tentatively. "What is this?"

James paused his rifling through cabinets and looked up, his face lit by wandlight. "Don't tell me your reality doesn't have a Hogwarts."

Sirius couldn't take his eyes off it, but the shock of it prevented him from taking it seriously. It was like seeing your best friend crushed to death by a giant vermillion housecat. Terrible, tragic, and so terribly confusing that it's almost funny. "Where I'm from Hogwarts has… I don't know, glass in its windows and trees in its forest and..." Sirius leaned further out the window. "…and water in its lake."

The Black Lake was little more than a Black Mud Puddle; a damp, yawning chasm garnished with the moldering skeleton of a giant squid. Beyond that, the charred stumps of the Forbidden Forest stretched to the horizon.

"Really a shame about the forest." Sighed Albus, conjuring himself a chintz armchair and taking a seat.

"Oh, he's just like the last guy." Regulus groused, then affected a mocking, high-pitched voice. "In _my _reality, Lord Voldemort was a _terrifying_ butterfly and every kitten in the whole land tried to bat at him and time after time they failed…" Regulus glanced at Sirius, smirking, to see if he had gotten a rise. To his disappointment, Sirius was still fixated on the ruined castle. Regulus gave a short, exhasperated sigh, dropped to a crouch next to James, and lowered his voice to a near-whisper. "Do we trust him?"

James was slightly surprised. "Why wouldn't we?"

"He's off, James, and you know it."

"Give him some time. You've probably died as well."

Regulus glared. "It's not just that."

James ignored the comment and shouldered him out of the way of his cabinet-digging. "Ten more minutes and he'll wonder why he missed you at all."

#4#$gDFw343F*^%#$

Dumbledore sank into his desk chair and, after replacing his disgustingly ornate quill, began to build the foundations of a card tower. His coherent explanations had been repeatedly interrupted and then completely ignored in favor of a detailed game of spot-the-differences between the New Other Sirius' native reality and the reality at hand.

"So my parents aren't dead where you're from…"

"…but Voldemort is?"

"Yeah…Hold on, why did you ask me if I was ever sent to Azkaban? Why the hell would I have been in Azkaban?"

"Oh, you lucky bastard..."

%$#^!35$^4%$&*

"People, come _on_." Tonks had leapt up on the dais to get a closer look at the recently stunned man. "We're looking for a death eater." She pulled Sirius, still unconscious, into a sitting position by the front of his robes so everyone could see. "This guy wouldn't know a dementor if it bit him in the arse." Hyperbole aside, she was right. He looked at least a decade younger than either of the Siriuses they had seen, and in comparatively robust health.

"Not every death eater went to Azkaban…" Remus suggested, with very little conviction. Tonks rolled her eyes and aimed her wand.

"_Ennervate."_

"_Gnugh_hello." Sirius rolled onto the balls of his feet and into a standing position, then turned to Tonks. "I'm in the wrong reality. Yeaheh," he smiled, "You already knew that, never mind." He rubbed the back of his head and gave both the Order at large and the stone floor behind him a disapproving glance "Merlin's pants, quick on the stunners around here, aren't you? I wonder if that's why you're not dead…" He made the last comment largely to himself.

"Sirius, are you a death eater?" Dumbledore asked, almost lazily.

"No, why would—oh…" his face lit up light he had just figured out the punchline to a very clever joke. "Oh, but I'll bet I _am_." He laughed in a single, short bark. "Here. The me that you were looking for."

"That's right, brilliant," said Tonks, "Now I know we're going to have some unfounded accusations for New New Sirius, but let's hold those and portkey back to Hogwarts before the unspeakables find us. I feel like we're behind some kind of schedule."

!#$#$!#!$4324%$#

There was a half-second lag where everyones brains realigned themselves so that Sirius Black could be evil. Except for Lily and Dumbledore, who had suspected it all along, but couldn't think of a polite way to point this out. During the half second, Lily thought something along the lines of "_Well, duh."_ After the half-second, James and Harry donned near-identical expressions of loathing and drew their wands. Neville shuffled forward as quickly and unnoticeably as he could to pull Kate Potter out of harm's way.

When his daughter was safely behind Neville, James fired a nonverbal spell at Sirius and began to close the gap between them. There was a faint metal click as the spell hit, and another as the manacles fell to the floor behind Sirius. "I'm morally opposed to punching a man who can't punch me back." James explained evenly, then punched Sirius. "I'm also morally opposed to you."

James' second sentence went unheard and unanswered because Sirius had already fallen to the floor, unconscious. James' third sentence—"Aw, Hellfire, he can't take a punch." Also went unheard, this time because it was drowned out by everyone else's cries of either "_Dad!" _or "_James!" _or, in Kate's case, _"Sirius!"_


	15. A Brief Interlude Part I

A/N: Here it is folks. It's new, it's improved, it's—

Not a chapter!

As you can imagine, this story required me to think up a bunch of AU fics and then crash them into each other. Well, that didn't work so well, but in the process, I had an idea.

There are very few things that haven't been done before in the vast cesspool of Harry Potter fanfiction, and I doubt this is any different, but the point is, it was an angle I hadn't tried before.

And then I realized that I couldn't get it to fit into this story with a rubber mallet and a quart of Crisco, and that I would only make a mess trying, so I laid it to rest among the many Harry Potter plot bunnies that had gone before.

And then it clawed itself out of its grave and slit the throat of the plot I was trying to write.

I present to you, in lieu of a chapter, a zombie plot bunny, because I assume that most of you folks (all, gosh, four of you? ;D) like Sirius Black themed AU well enough or you wouldn't be here.

Mind, this isn't the end of that other story. Not officially, at any rate. This is merely…

A BREIF INTERLUDE:

Part I

_ There's a fortress on an island in the middle of the sea,_

_ Where they'll send you if you're evil as can evil as can be._

_ Yes they'll lock you in a tower and they'll throw away the key,_

_ If you're evil as can evil as can evil as can be. _

Remus walked into Azkaban with purpose.

_ So it isn't in your in-te-rests to dis. A. Gree._

_ With your mother or your father or the min-i-stry._

His purpose was to leave again as soon as possible, and it was a compelling one.

_Where they'll feed you to dementors and they'll never set you free,_

'_Cause you're evil, 'cause you're evil, 'cause you're evil as can be._

It was a grotesque skipping rhyme of sorts, and it was better than thinking. Even with the dementors gone, the place was horrid.

_And it's cold as all creation and there's nowhere you can flee,_

'_Cept the bottom, 'cept the bottom, 'cept the bottom of the sea_

_._

He supposed he had learned it at Hogwarts. Or perhaps from his father, before that sort of thing would have been considered tasteless.

_So before you go out late upon a kill-ing-spree,_

_Or refuse to eat your vegetables or drink your tea,_

It was a simple rhyme scheme, and easy to cheat, so Remus filled in his own lines as he thought of them.

_Think about how long a year is or a cen-tu-ry_

_How much longer yet they'll feel if you're in ag-on-y,_

_And try not to think too hard about the i-ro-ny _that Sirius Black had taught it to him. First year. He spared half a thought to wonder if they had caught him yet, then went on not thinking.

'_Cause they won't listen to you crying they won't listen to you plea,_

_ And you'll die there in the fortress on an island in the middle of the… _"Wotcher, Remus." Dora stepped out of one of many open cells, silhouetted in dusty grey light. She looked beautiful—she always did. Her hair today was a shade of blue that Remus did not know the name for. Indigo, maybe plum. She kissed him in both greeting and apology and took his hand.

She opened her mouth to say something staggeringly important then veered off at the last minute.

"Last section, you know." she said, nodding towards the empty corridor and beginning to smile. "Then we should have a full account of the remaining death eaters. It's not so bad up here, either. Almost anyone important enough for security this high was important enough to let out when they took over. It's mostly..." Dora trailed off and sighed. "There's no delicate way to put this one, Remus."

Under ideal circumstances, Remus would have smiled and said something comforting and jaunty like… well, that was the trouble, wasn't it? If he could've thought of something comforting and jaunty, he could have said it. Instead he looked into her eyes somewhat vacantly and waited for whatever she was going to say.

In the end, she didn't say anything at all. She simply lead him back into the cell he had taken for empty and looked down at a particularly dense bit of shadow.

"I wouldn't have even noticed him, except his door was still locked."

_Him? _

Remus lit his wand and filled the corner with light, revealing an old friend, an emaciated black dog, and the reason no one had been able to track down Sirius Black.

"Oh, _god._" Remus said quietly. "He never…they never even…" he dragged a hand down his face and took a few steps back, plunging the corner back into darkness. Suddenly, the cold of the place felt clammy. A suffocating damp in the air. He needed to breathe, but had the presence of mind to know that he wouldn't be able to open the window. "Stand back a moment, Dora?" he said, in a mild conversational tone that anyone who knew Remus knew better than to question. Then he pointed his wand at the window and blasted the whole wall into the sea.

A few minutes of sunlight and fresh air later, and Remus thought it was almost funny. Ever since the first of the breakouts, they'd been waiting for Sirius to show up. In the papers, on the posters. Crazed and vengeful. Black cloak and skull mask. Aurors and Order-members and civilians, all of them awaiting and fearing the return of Voldemort's right hand man because in a way, it was symbolic. Sirius' arrest had marked the end of the bloodshed. The last, definite signal that it was over.

With him free, the bloodshed would be very officially back again. In the end, they had all just assumed that he had gotten out at some point and no-one had bothered to put up posters because everyone already knew.

But now Voldemort was dead and the war was won, and the ministry and the aurors—Harry among them, were out looking for Sirius Black, hoping to catch him before he pulled off another thirteen-in-one. And Sirius had been here all along. Right where they had left him. Slowly starving to death because no-one had bothered to check.

Almost funny.

Almost.

"What do you think we should do with him?" Tonks asked.

Remus shrugged. "Un-transform him, tell the rest of the Aurors…they'll probably want to run some tests… bury him." He looked back at the dead animagus, now bathed in the light of the early afternoon and not looking very much better for it. "I can't believe he could still do it." He said quietly, shaking his head. "Right up to the very end."

"Hey, Remus?" Tonks was very gently prodding the corpse.

"Hm?"

"I don't think—" a high, faint whine escaped its throat. "Yep, definitely not dead." Remus froze. Tonks smiled. "That's why I patronused you. I would have told you sooner, but I thought he might have died before you got here and I wanted to make sure."

"Easy mistake to make." Remus said faintly. "He's got that look about him."

"That look like he couldn't possibly be alive."

"Though I did wonder why you'd conjured a blanket for a corpse." Remus admitted.

"Sentimentality?"

They continued to look at Sirius who, as they were very slowly coming to terms with, had somehow reached the top of the most wanted list without even lifting a finger.

"We should probably tell Harry." Remus lowered himself onto the floor next to Sirius. "And…try to make sure he doesn't die."

"Ted's at mom's house?"

Remus nodded.

"Then we could bring Sirius to your old place."

Remus could think of several flaws in this plan, the first of them being that Sirius Black had no business being anywhere even remotely pleasant. There were plenty of reasonable things they could do. Ministry holding cells. Secure wing at Saint Mungos. Move him to a part of Azkaban that was still being used. But, to his surprise, Remus was already nodding.

"We can't just walk out with him, though."

_What? _Said the cool, logical part of his brain. _Why would you want to walk out of here with him?_

_Shut up._ Said the other part.

"I don't think anyone would notice."

"If he wakes up and starts barking?"

"Oh, yeah. Sound carries in this place like you wouldn't believe." Tonks smiled teasingly. "I heard you humming all the way up the stairs."

"Was I?"

"Sounded like that awful clapping game. _There's a fortress on an island in the middle of the sea,_" she made the hand motions with an invisible partner.

"_Evil evil evil evil…"_

"Most of the wards are down, though." He glanced at what had recently been a wall. "We might be able to apparate out."

"_..'cept the bottom of the sea._ No harm in trying. Your old house, then?"

Remus nodded, puzzled over which part of a dog you hold onto for side-along apparition (he eventually settled on a paw) and disappeared with a loud, damp, and slightly reluctant **pop**.

When he arrived, Tonks was already bent double on the lawn. "…_Son of a bitch_ of a bad idea..." She groaned. Remus was harboring similar mentalities.

It had felt as if the rubbery hose of apparition had gone stiff and rusty and unusually cold over the years, and it had been, by far, the longest apparition he had ever experienced. Not the furthest, but the least instantaneous.

"…Think my head's going to cave in-where's Sirius?"

Remus looked around and swore, but before they could start worrying with any intensity, Sirius appeared out of nowhere with the same thick **pop** and scrambled to his feet-paws. He held himself low and dug his claws in as if he didn't trust the ground to stay where it was. They couldn't exactly blame him.

"Poor bugger."

"What a way to wake up."

Tonks got to her feet and began to sort through a small ring of keys.

"There's one under the boot scraper if you can't find yours." Remus followed her to the front door and they both went inside.

They stood for a minute in silence in the dark front hall. The house had been empty for over a year now. In fact, calling it a house was generous, and calling it a cottage suggested a cozy warmth that it did not possess. Remus had lived there on and off for fifteen years and it had never been more than the building that kept the rain off when he slept.

Tonks picked a blade of grass off her shirt. "How many people did he kill, again?"

Thirteen seemed like a lot. These things always got exaggerated in the re-telling. She had probably just remembered it wrong.

"Fifteen." Said Remus.

He dragged a finger through the dust on the kitchen table.

That was the trouble with magic, sometimes. You didn't have time to stop and reconsider. You couldn't turn back halfway. You just pop a couple hundred miles away with a murderer in tow and—_where was he this time?_

"Dora, did you see Sirius come inside?"

"No," she looked around sharply "I thought he was right with you."

"Oh for the love of—" he pushed through the screen door. It opened halfway then collided with the massive black shape on the front stoop, which yelped indignantly and slunk out of the way. "…never mind. Found him." He propped the door open with the boot scraper and went back in. "Screen door." He wiggled his opposable thumb pointedly.

"Do you suppose he's stuck like that?"

Remus shrugged. "Could be. It's a complicated process and he preformed it under less-than-ideal circumstances. It might have gone wrong. It might have gone right and he can't change anyway. It could also explain why the death eaters left him behind."

"He's not much use if he can't hold a wand."

"Still it's…" he ran a hand through his hair. "It's odd."

"We should go." Said Tonks, "It's getting late and I'll bet mum's holding up dinner for us."

She disappeared with a quiet pop and Remus followed.

The sound of the late summer evening crept in to fill the silence.

Then there was a slightly louder pop, and Tonks reappeared.

"—and I suppose he'll open the cabinets with his teeth. Merlin help us, we're going to kill him…"

Then the summer evening sounds returned.

Then they left again.

"Hey, Sirius?" it was Remus again. "Don't leave the property, I've got it warded." He would be able to leave if he tried, but Remus would know about it.

Several minutes passed.

Tonks was back again, this time wielding a can opener. She tripped over the boot scraper and the death eater on the way in and mumbled something about never again taking her thumbs for granted.

The summer sound came back slowly this time, tentatively, knowing that as soon as it had gotten settled in someone would-

_Pop!_

_Pop!_

"—Remus, I'm _sure _a dog would eat canned cranberry sauce if he was really hungry—"

"I don't think a _person_ would eat canned cranberry sauce…"

"Then why do you even have it in your house-?"

_Pop!_

_Pop!_

And they were gone for the night.

That was the trouble with magic sometimes.

The sun set, the summer sounds came back, and if anyone had been around to notice, they might have thought the dog on the porch was smiling.

Three days passed and nothing especially interesting happened. Remus and Tonks occasionally stopped by. The house had taken on a very subtly lived-in appearance. Dishes had been used. Faucets had been run. Books had been put back in very nearly the correct order, but they still hadn't seen Sirius as anything but a dog. Neither of them felt like pressing the matter.

They had been unable to contact Harry.

He had been part of an auror team on a trip to Denmark after rudimentary tracking spells—the sort available to any magical post owl, had finally begun to work on Black. They had gotten there—by broom, of all things, because the government of Denmark wouldn't grant them a portkey or apparition license, only to find their spells pointing in the opposite direction, giving the ridiculous impression that he was somewhere in the middle of the north sea.

They got back into the ministry that night, sore and stiff and generally unhappy. "Well," said Kingsley, "At least we know he's not in Denmark. Everyone can have tomorrow off to regain the feeling in their-"

"Toes, Shacklebolt?" one auror interrupted delicately.

"Right," he grinned and winced at the same time. "See you all Monday."

Harry mumbled some goodbyes and limped into the atrium using his broom handle as a walking stick. A few more trips like that, and that was all it would be good for. The tail had been dragging the whole way back from Denmark, the gold lettering that had once said "Nimbus 2000" had all but rubbed off, and the cushioning charm didn't seem to be working as well as it used to.

When he got to the fireplace, he paused. He wanted to go home.

He did not want to wake up tomorrow to find that someone else had found Sirius Black first. Given the man's reputation.

As a half-hearted compensation for the fact that he was not going to do any more searching tonight, he performed the tracking spell. His wand spun in the palm of his hand and produced a wispy teal arrow.

Harry stared at it for a moment, puzzled. Was that a different direction? It certainly looked brighter than it had before…

He took the visitors entrance to the street level, checked his cardinal directions, and tried it again. Black had very definitely moved.

Tracking spells were troublesome things. The only legal ones were weak and vague, and even those required special clearance. They were also very easily blocked. Still, it was indicating more strongly than it ever had before, which meant he was closer than he had ever been before, and the Weasleys didn't expect Harry home until tomorrow at the earliest. He steeled himself and slid gingerly onto his broom.

That was the other trouble with tracking spells. You couldn't apparate somewhere when you weren't precisely sure where you were going.

Within a few hours, he had circled in on a tiny house in the middle of nowhere. Someone had left a light on in the kitchen, but he could find no-one inside. When he landed in the overgrown front yard, he saw that someone had left the front door not only ajar, but propped open.

It all seemed highly suspicious. He took out a decoy detonator—now part of an auror's standard equipment, sent it through, and hid in the bushes to watch. It yielded nothing but a lot of noise, and because of it, Harry failed to hear something stirring in the bushes behind him. Then the noise died down and he felt hot breath on the back of his neck. He froze. Something was sniffing him. Something prodded him in the ribs with its nose. Something circled in front of him, sat back on its haunches, and looked at him expectantly.

Just a wild animal. Just a wolf, or a dog, or a bear. What was he supposed to do about those? Stand perfectly still? Make himself look bigger? Drop his pack and run away?

_Or maybe it's an animagus._

The truth dawned on him, smacking him on the back of the head for being stupid as it did.

_Sirius Black was an animagus._

Of course he was. How had he forgotten? His old Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher had told him right after being canned for being a werewolf, and Remus Lupin the night after the full moon did not make for an easily forgotten meeting.

_"Harry," _he had said, sitting at what had presumably been his desk, a gash in the side of his face still oozing blood. _"There is something I have to tell you…"_

"…Something your father would have wanted me to tell you." He smiled slightly. "Truthfully, he would have wanted to tell you himself. And barring that he would have wanted you to hear it from your godfather."

"I have a—?"

"No. Sort of. Not really." He sighed. All of the days out of the month, and he had to explain this on the night after the full moon. A bad full moon, too. The wolfsbane potion had somehow been contaminated.

In the interest of curiosity, a moth had died in flight and fallen into the cauldron. No-one ever figured out what had happened, though. Not even the moth.

He had spent the night destroying his office, howling at things, and generally blowing his cover as a werewolf.

So this was it. Monstrous black dog. Feared throughout Britain. Coward. Traitor. Voldemort's right-hand man. He looked a bit worse for wear at the moment. And why hadn't he done anything yet?

Harry whirled around to make sure he hadn't stepped into some kind of trap, and then looked back at the death eater.

"I know who you are." He said, taking a step forward. He'd taken out Voldemort five times, after all. Now was no time to get cocky, but he wasn't exactly wetting himself in fear. "And my friend taught me how to force animagi to reveal themselves, but I should warn you," he smiled dangerously "I'm not very good at it."

"Wouldn't want to get stuck halfway." Said the dog in a voice that had sat around gathering dust for a few years. He had shuddered into a standing position and was not a dog anymore. Harry immediately disarmed him, but the spell rippled through the man like a particularly strong gust of wind. Harry gaped. Black didn't even have a wand.

"Do you _want_ to be caught, Black? Miss the food in Azkaban, maybe? Homesick for a dementor?"

Sirius looked down quickly to hide a grin. Harry looked repulsed.

"Shit, are you smiling?"

"No, of course not. Trick of the light. You haven't had a chance to talk to Remus Lupin lately?"

"What? No, I've been in Denmark. Why?"

Sirius shrugged. "He should probably explain." He paused. "Because it doesn't make much sense to me either…want to come inside?"

"Got the bodies all tucked away in the basement?" said Harry, partially to himself. "I wouldn't want to trip..."

"The attic." Black said flatly. "Put them in the basement and the whole house reeks."

Harry stopped to consider. If Black really had any corpses rotting in here, he probably wouldn't be making jokes about them. Then again, he was probably insane. Sirius glanced back.

"I'm kidding, Harry."

_Well, that went over like a sack of bricks._

(Which was coincidentally what they were both thinking at the moment.)

When they got into the light of the kitchen and saw each other clearly, they both winced very slightly and looked away. Sirius because Harry looked uncannily like James, and Harry because Sirius just had one of those faces now.

"Hey, you want something to eat?"

"Sure. Haven't eaten since Denmark." He sat down at the table and sprang back up in a single fluid motion. It was really an impressive feat. Had he been an older man, he would have pulled several muscles. "I'm supposed to be arresting you."

"Arrest a man on an empty stomach?" Sirius was shoulder-deep in a cabinet. "Unthinkable. Looks like our choices are…kidney beans, canned pasta, or evaporated milk."

Harry bit his lip and checked his watch. Too late to go home, too early to go back to the ministry. Outside, the sun was just beginning to rise. _Might as well get to know your godfather._

"I didn't know pasta came in cans."

"Me neither. Looks like we have a winner."

Harry sat back down and Sirius emptied the can into a saucepan.

"And to drink, we've got tapwater." He filled two glasses, slid one across to Harry, and joined him at the table.

"So where have you been all this time?" Harry asked. Now that he knew what Black sounded like he was certain he hadn't been at the graveyard, or in the forbidden forest or… anywhere. There was a small joke in the Auror department that Black had cut and run before the second war even started, that he was on a beach somewhere trying not to draw attention to himself, but no-one believed it. He had to have some secret army gathered somewhere. Find Black, and you find the rest of the death eaters.

It was a given.

But here they were in a house in the middle of nowhere eating canned pasta and there wasn't a death eater but him to be found.

"Where I was for the whole war," Sirius leaned forward conspiratorially "Since the day Voldemort started breaking death eaters out, is written down next to my name in a file in the ministry somewhere. If they've had Aurors out looking for me all this time...well," he smirked "that would almost be funny. You were in Denmark, you said? Looking for me?"

Harry nodded, his mind reluctantly sidling up to the point Sirius was trying to make.

"And I imagine you were using a tracking spell."

Sirius grabbed a pencil stub and an old newspaper from the counter behind him and drew a crude map, upside-down, so it faced Harry.

Someone had done most of the crossword puzzle.

"So your tracking spell pointed to Denmark…" he drew a dotted line. "And then it said that I was back in England…" he drew another.

Whoever had done the crossword puzzle must have been living under a rock for the past decade or so.

"Do you know where Azkaban is, Harry?"

They had gotten the obscure history clue and missed the one about the Wyred Sisters.

Harry looked from Sirius to the map, to the place where the dotted lines crossed.

It was somewhere in the middle of the North Sea.

"Oh, I'm an _idiot._"

Sirius got up and poured the canned pasta into two bowls.

Harry looked down at a bowl and poked a noodle uncertainly, then switched his bowl for the one Sirius had already taken a bite out of.

He was still fairly sure it was going to kill him.

"You know what I think?"

"Hm?"

"I think your taste buds died in prison."

Sirius snorted and forced down his current mouthful. It had been two hours, and he was on his second can.

"I'm not kidding, they committed suicide en masse. It was a matter of survival."

"No, what happened was _your_ taste buds got desensitized." He scraped the last of the mysterious red sauce out of his bowl.

"I'm going to be sick just looking at you…"

"You just can't taste-"

_Pop!_

"-The depth of flavor. The delicate subtleties of canned pasta."

Harry's stomach squirmed at the thought of tasting it any more than he already did. "Did you just hear someone apparate?"

"Probably Dora. She usually drops in about now."

"And what does she make of you?" _Because I'm completely lost._

Sirius dropped his spoon into his empty bowl and looked, if Harry wasn't much mistaken, embarrassed.

"She, um…she hasn't met me yet."

"That doesn't make much sense, Black. And anyway," Harry leaned back in his chair so he could see into the front hall. "It's Remus."

"Hello, Harry."

"_Oi, get back in here you cowardly sod!"_

"Sorry?"

"Oh, I'm just…yelling at Sirius Black."

Black had transformed and left through the back door the moment Remus had entered.

Remus nodded as if this made perfect sense and surveyed the kitchen.

"The tracking spell had changed." Harry explained, and then found that he couldn't explain any of what happened next. "We should probably do something about that before the rest of the aurors show up." he glanced down at the drawing. "So he never got out of Azkaban?"

"As far as we can tell." Remus followed Harry's glance and picked up the newspaper. "I'll bet you felt like an idiot." He was smiling.

"I still feel like an idiot. Any idea why he won't talk to you?"

Remus was still staring at the newspaper.

"No." he said quietly, his smile faded.

And as he looked at the half-finished crossword puzzle, that was all he could bring himself to say.

Harry arrived at the ministry just in time to remember that Kingsley had given them the day off. Instead of going back to the burrow, he did what he always did when there was something he did not understand.

He talked to Hermione.

Hermione was working in the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Department, wedged between the desks of Weasley and Perkins. She was only working there for the summer before going back to Hogwarts for her seventh year. Harry was considering joining her. He enjoyed Auror training, but the chance to go through a year at Hogwarts without Snape, Malfoy, or Voldemort was sorely tempting.

"Hey, Hermione." He found her sitting daintily atop a file cabinet, working her way down a towering stack of parchment. "Have a minute?"

"Of course I do, Harry." She said brightly, "come in, sit down wherever you can." Harry couldn't even find Perkins' desk under all the paper towers and boxes of contraband, so he decided to stay where he was. Who knew what might be hiding in a place like this. "I'm certainly not doing anything that can't wait another year." She shot the stack of papers a dirty look. "I swear, I'm finding things from before we were born. Some of it's _very_ interesting, but most of it's rubbish. You would think people would grow tired of charming biting teacups after the first hundred times… Did you have any luck in Denmark?" Harry grimaced. "Sorry, Harry. I'm sure they'll all turn up eventually."

"Actually we…" he glanced around to make sure no-one could listen in and closed the door behind him. "…we found Black."

"That's wonderful! Why hasn't it been announced? He's gotten away, hasn't he…"

"No, no, but we didn't find him in Denmark. _We_ didn't find him at all." Hermione gave him a puzzled glance as she picked her way down from the cabinet. "Tonks found him."

"Tonks? But I thought she was clearing out…oh." Hermione's eyes widened. "Oh _dear._ You don't mean—?"

"Voldemort never broke him out."

"Well, Voldemort's right hand man my foot. I suppose he wasn't much use to them after the dementors had turned him into a gibbering wreck so they tossed him off like so much used parchment."

"That would make perfect sense—"

"It doesn't?"

"Except he isn't."

"What do you mean?"

Harry flattened his bangs and told her what had happened. When he finished, Hermione thought for a moment in silence. Eventually, she said;

"Thirteen people can't possibly be right."

As if ten would be one thing, eleven would be pushing it, and thirteen was just ridiculous.

"Thirteen people in one spell." He sighed. "Not to mention my parents and the people who ended up dead when he leaked Order information."

"Maybe he was framed."

Hermione jumped in surprise and had to steady the stack of parchment with her wand.

"Bloody hell_, _Perkins," Harry gasped, straining to find the owner of the voice. "Where did you come from?"

"Been here all along, kids. Didn't want to interrupt." An ancient wizard peeked out from behind three crates and a file cabinet. He was dressed in an old-fashioned muggle suit and walked with a gnarled wooden staff. He had a tiny yellow rubber duck affixed to the brim of his fedora, apparently for decoration. "Oughter check a room better before you go talking about things you don't want listened to." He said. "Don't worry though, I shan't go blabbing about. Not that they'd believe me anyway. 'Oh, there's mad old Perkins, wears a duck on his head and thinks muggles have magic coming out little holes in their walls.'" He chuckled.

"No, I shan't tell a soul, but I oughter tell you, I arrested that lad Black once."

Hermione scoffed. "Mr. Perkins, what was a misuse of muggle artifacts worker doing catching death eaters?"

Perkins chuckled again and shook his head. "The question you oughter be asking, young lady, is what was a death eater doing flying about on an enchanted motorbike?" He tapped his staff against the ground and a single sheet of parchment slid out from near the top of one of the stacks, followed by a yellowed newspaper clipping.

It was from a muggle newspaper—a report about police officers accosted by two young men on a flying motor bike, calling themselves by the presumably fake names of 'James Potter' and 'Sirius Black.' The parchment was Perkins' hand-written report, detailing how the men were apprehended in Auror headquarters and fined three galleons each for "Being a bloody nuisance."

"I don't think they figured on anyone reading the muggle newspaper." Said Perkins. "And yes, Potter, that was your father with him. Look, lad," Perkins pushed his fedora back to look Harry in the eye. "People like to forget who Black was, but who he was was your dad's best friend and you're spitting on his grave to think that doesn't count for anything. Give your old man a little credit as a judge of character, and since he's not around to tell you himself, I'll tell you instead: James Potter was no damn fool. Now if you'll excuse me Potter, Granger, I've got a biting teakettle to collect in South Wales."

He shuffled out of the tiny office mumbling "Some jokes just never get old," leaving Harry and Hermione to stare after him in shock.

"I can honestly say" Harry said eventually "That I had never thought about it like that."

"Oh, don't mind Perkins, Harry." She shook her head. "People… change, friends grow apart, I'm sure your father—"

"Two years."

"Sorry?"

"Two years after this," he waved the newspaper article that he was now reading in more detail. "and my parents were dead. And Black was in prison. They weren't very much older than we are. And they were best friends since…Merlin, since _first year_."

"Harry try not to—"

"Hermione that would be like Ron turning out to be a death eater. Like _you _turning out to be a death eater. Or—or me turning out to be a death eater and you not knowing it, _something_ is not falling into place here."

"Harry," she said gently "even if he was a decent person and the ministry made a horrible mistake, it's been sixteen years. Sixteen years and he spent them in _Azkaban_. Good men go bad and bad men go worse, and all of them go mad in the process. There's a reason Dumbledore hated the place."

"Hermione, I already met him."

"That…" Hermione paused. "had _completely _slipped my mind, wow. Right, of course. Let's go root around the case records and solve this thing."

Harry finished off the article as he followed her out and smirked.

_Ha._

'_Elvendork.'_

Tonks walked through the tiny house in the middle of nowhere and out into the badly-overgrown garden. It wasn't so much a garden as it was a patch where the trees hadn't grown. It sloped away on all sides into the thick trees that presumably contained the edge of the property. It was into these trees she walked, guided by the sound of disrupted underbrush and fleeing wildlife.

"Hey, Sirius?" she called, when she had gotten close enough to make him out through the trees. The rustling stopped. "Remus said you've been teasing the hell out of the wards. Something about getting close as possible without crossing…anyway, he wanted me to make sure you weren't—"

"_Ow, _son of a—!" Sirius had changed, only to find himself some feet taller and surrounded by thorny branches. His curses dissolved into irritable dog-whimpering until he had wormed his way out of the underbrush and changed back. "Sorry, you were saying?"

"…weren't…um…making devious schemes, I think it was. I'm Tonks, by the way." Said Tonks. "I don't think we've been properly introduced."

"I'm Sirius." Said Sirius. "Honored to be your guest."

"Well, that's good. I left some takeout Chinese in the kitchen. Your cheek's bleeding, by the way—what were you doing in the woods?"

"Just seeing where the property line was. Matter of curiosity."

"Oh, alright. I'll let Remus know. Have a good afternoon."

"You too."

And Tonks dissapparated.

A/n: There's a part II in the works. That would have been an awfully strange place to end and Interlude. Hope it's not too repetitive? Not shit you've already seen? Please let me know =)

Holy god, has anyone ever tried to make a 'Bigsmile' smiley face (One of these '=D' puppies) in Times New Roman? It looks like the fucking Joker.

"Wanna know how I got these scarrrs?"

Haha…

Oh man, now I'm going to have to bump up the story rating for all the foul language I use in my author's notes…


	16. A Brief Interlude Part II

A BREIF INTERLUDE

PART II

Harry, Hermione, Ron, Ginny, and Tonks sat on the floor in a warehouse-sized room in the bowels of the Ministry of Magic. Ginny and Ron they had flood at the Burrow and Tonks they had found, interestingly enough, already scouring records. They felt as if they were at Hogwarts again; rooting through mountains of irrelevant information to solve a problem that was over their heads and finding jack shit.

They had gotten through 47 testimonies from muggle witnesses and statements from the dozen magical law enforcement officers who had taken him in. They had the recorded opinions of Cornelius Fudge, Rufus Scridgemore, Alastor Moody, Rubeus Hagrid, the Potters' old neighbor who thought he had always had a suspicious look about him, Minerva McGonigal and Severus Snape on a slightly unrelated accusation, and perhaps the most damning, Albus Dumbledore, who had provided a detailed explanation of how Black had been the _only_ man who could have possibly betrayed the Potters, concluding his statement with…

Ron read it over twice to make sure he wasn't mistaken. "Looks like… '_May he rot there._'"

Ginny grabbed the parchment out of Ron's hand, intent on examining it for herself. "He can't have said that."

"Honestly Ron, does that sound like Dumbledore?"

Ron shrugged and waited for the statement to make its rounds.

"It's…" Harry looked bewildered. "It's in his handwriting."

"I've heard him give more charitable descriptions of old snake-face himself." Muttered Tonks.

"Well that's different, isn't it?" said Ron. "Voldemort, he was a good _honest_ evil. You know where you stand with him and it's bloody well out of his way. This guy gets right chummy with you and then stabs you in the back with the knife you just lent him."

Harry had to agree. "It's almost like Dumbledore knew this would happen, you know? Like he knew this would come up eventually and didn't want to leave any gray area for Black to wiggle into."

"What kind of security is this guy under again?" asked Ginny.

Tonks appeared thoughtful for a moment. "Well, lets see… if you take into account the…and he'd still have to get through the… yep, none at all."

They gave a low, collective groan.

"But hey," said Ron. "Good on him for trying to off Snape."

"_Ronald._"

"Yeah, mate. Lay off Snape."

Ron looked at Harry as though deeply hurt. He had come to expect disapproval from Hermione, but hearing it from Harry was different. They were acting as if one good deed and a crush on your mum excused a man from a lifetime of being a git.

"Look," said Hermione "let's go ask someone who hasn't been obliterated or died."

And they did.

xXx

"So I had bundled all of my hatred onto this... _image_, you see. This invented person stowed away in the corner of my mind and everything was safe there. Everything worked. It was silly, I'm sure, but it was never supposed to matter. I mean, until all that 'Voldemort's right hand man' nonsense came up I have to admit I thought he'd already died. Hah. God, so much for that one, eh?

"But now he's back—can't tell you why I did _that _either, that was pretty boneheaded—and the point is he isn't that image. He's just a person. I've never been good at hating people, you know. Sometimes I feel like I should just forget the whole thing and assume he's terribly sorry about it but that would feel sort of—"

"Ga."

"—disloyal. Yes. Exactly. I mean, we can't just let him off… Can we?"

Remus glanced down at his small teal-haired confident.

"And I'm not just holding this spoonful of pureed corn up for my benefit, if that's what you were thinking."

Was it teal? Or maybe taupe. No, wasn't taupe a shade of brown? He didn't think he made for an especially good father if he didn't even know the color of his son's hair, but these might be considered extenuating circumstances.

His thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of a large white patronus in the shape of a dog.

"Apparate to your basement." It said. "It's kind of urgent."

And then it vanished.

"And now he's gone and done something like this." Said Remus, gathering Teddy out of his high-chair. "Same bloody patronus he's had all his life except he wasn't a murderer before. You get to spend some more time with your grandmother, though, so it's not all bad. Probably feeds you something more interesting than carrots." He retrieved the floo powder from an urn next to the fireplace and paused in front of the grate. "Just between you and me, though," he said, "I wouldn't eat them either. Don't tell your grandmother."

"Ga."

"There's a good lad."

He threw a pinch of powder into the fire and stepped through.

xXx

Most tracking spells can be blocked with little more than a conscious thought, or even an especially strong unconscious desire to remain unfound. That is, most legal tracking spells.

There are several dark rituals that are a good bit harder to block. The downsides to these are that they take fairly long to set up, particularly for the inexperienced, and by the time you've finished your target will be smeared all over the place.

Unless your target has remained relatively stationary.

Say, if he were asked to remain in a house in the middle of nowhere,

That was protected by little more than a magical burglar alarm.

And if he was widely believed to be,

say,

rallying an army of death eaters.

Well,

That person might find themselves host to some unexpected visitors.

xXx

Rather than maneuver the Hogwarts security and crowd into Hagrids hut, they agreed to meet him in the Three Broomsticks.

Between him and Madame Rosemarta and a half-gallon of mead, they were about to find out more about Sirius Black than they would know what to do with.

xXx

Remus realized only after apparating out of Andromeda's living room that apparating into the basement of his house in the middle of nowhere was the perfect way to walk right into a trap. He didn't realize it fast enough to apparate anywhere else, but it ensured that he landed completely off balance with a sound like a small cannon going off. He flailed around for a moment and knocked over the sort of box that every basement cultivates. The box had three books in it, none of which had ever been read by anyone, a collection of marbles, three quarters of a muggle chess set, and a small wooden model of a giraffe with two of its legs missing. Such is the nature of basements.

When Remus had finally steadied himself, he noticed a man standing by the stairs, dimly lit by the glow of a single hanging light bulb.

"Sirius?" said Remus. It was an educated guess. There was nothing about the man to suggest that he was not Sirius Black, but there was little to suggest that he was, either.

"Remus." Said the man. It sounded like he was gritting his teeth.

"…I…um…_expelliarmus._" His tone was distinctly apologetic, and the spell had about the enthusiasm to match. Sirius picked a wand up from the stair behind him and rolled it across the floor. "Thanks." It wasn't Sirius' wand as far as he could tell. Sirius' had been redder. "Where did you get this?"

"Borrowed it off a Death Eater." Said Sirius, avoiding his gaze. "Loads of them upstairs. Eager little buggers. Probably would've given me a kidney if I'd said I fancied a snack."

Remus blinked. "Don't you think it's impolite of you to throw a death eater party in another man's home?"

_Death eater party._ What a word choice. "I saved you some bean dip."

"Useless without tortilla chips. What do you expect me to do, eat it with a spoon?"

"I…I missed you, Remus." There it was, floating so close to the brim of his consciousness that he couldn't stop it spilling out of his mouth. He went on as if it hadn't. "I don't know where they came from. They just showed up at the door expecting…well, me. But they expect me to know what the hell I'm doing, to be Voldemort's great successor or something—"

And then Remus hugged him. Possibly because he had never seen a man who had needed it more. Still a murderer, still a traitor, and Remus supposed, as he realized that Sirius was very quietly crying into his shoulder, that those people needed hugs too. Some minutes later, Sirius un-ceremoniously wiped his nose on the sleeve of Remus' jumper—the one that Sirius was wearing at the time, Remus took a few steps back, and they went on as if nothing at all had happened.

"What I'm trying to say is that I'm royally fucked. I mean, what are we going to do with three-dozen death eaters?"

"_Three-dozen_?" Remus looked up at the basement door. "I'm surprised they even fit in the house…"

"It's pretty crowded." said Sirius. "I think some of them are camped out in the yard."

"Recognize any of them?"

"Nah, they're all kids. Too young to have been Death Eaters in the first war or they wouldn't have come."

"Suppose they banded together when the Battle of Hogwarts went sour?"

"I'm going to have to trust you on that one."

"Oh, right…Sorry."

"Don't worry about it."

xXx

"Alright alright, how 'bout this one." Ginny paused for effect, trying very hard to keep from smiling. "_Evil twin._"

They all fell silent for a half-second too long.

"No," said Hermione, "No, there's no time for them to have switched."

And then they burst out laughing at the thought of having even considered the possibility.

"How about…" Ron screwed up his face in an effort to articulate his idea "…how about he went _so_ crazy that he came out the other side. See there's sane—" He pointed to a chart that only he could see. "…and then there's crazy, and then there's crazier and then there's _really fucking twisted_ and then there's nowhere else to go so you start over again."

Tonks nodded in mock-thoughtfulness. "It's novel. Azkaban drove him sane."

xXx

"This is killing me, Sirius. What did you do?"

Tired of standing around waiting for three-dozen death eaters to go find someone else to lead them, they had set up a game of chess.

"Which time?" Sirius paused halfway through moving a clothespin that was serving as his bishop.

"What did you do that even the death eaters want nothing to do with? Why did they leave you in Azkaban?"

Sirius looked at him for a few seconds, his expression unreadable.

"You're asking the wrong question." he said quietly, eventually.

Remus said nothing.

Sirius finished his move.

"Hang on," Remus scanned the board. "What are clothespins again?"

"Mine's a bishop. Yours is a rook."

"Right… and which way can this bottle opener move?

xXx

Hagrid had gone home and Rosmarta had shuffled them out at closing time.

"That was fun, guys," said Tonks "but I better get home. Remus'll be worried…" and she seemed to trip over her own feet, but was in fact at making the apparition turning-motion. They were still discussing how to get Ron home (he was far too drunk to apparate, having finally convinced Rosemarta to sell him firewhisky) when Tonks reappeared, very suddenly alert.

"Remus is gone. Mum said he went to see Sirius three hours ago."

There was an unspoken agreement followed by the stepped-on-bubble-wrap sound of four people apparating in very short succession, followed by a thud and a quiet groan as Ron Weasley fell over in the street.

Miles away, Harry Potter, his blood-traitor girlfriend, their mudblood friend, and that metamorphamagus Auror all appeared out of nowhere in a house full of second-generation death-eaters. Sons and daughters of the losing side.

You couldn't have cut the silence with a knife.

You couldn't have cut the silence with a _chainsaw._

It was just that silent.

Then, oblivious and irreverent, two voices drifted through the door of the basement, in the same way that an elephant might drift through a china cabinet.

"Hah. Checkmate."

"You dirty cheating—"

"You want to make something of it? Dibs on the giraffe statue, you can use your wand."

"That clothespin can't move like that!"

"_Your _clothespin can't move like that, maybe."

One of the boys standing nearest the basement door coughed nervously and slipped inside.

"Lord Black, sir," he said quietly, and Remus and Sirius fell silent. "We seem to have some unexpected guests. And may I ask, my lord, why you have my old defense against the dark arts professor in the basement."

"Oh don't worry, he's just as devoted to the D—" Sirius cut himself off midword as his brain realized what his tongue was about to say and threatened to bite it off if it uttered another syllable. "As devoted to Voldemort as I am. Now who are you and who's showed up?"

"Nott, isn't it?" Remus asked, calm and conversational. "Theodore Nott, yes, we were expecting someone. I imagine they look rather suspicious to you, but they're in disguise. Send them down, would you please?"

Nott looked to Sirius for confirmation. "Go on, then. You heard the evil dark were-…ever." Sirius' tongue wasn't having an especially good time of it. "I mean, whatever. Whatever he says is what…you ought to…do."

"I already know he's a werewolf, my lord."

"Oh," Sirius glanced at Remus, who gave him a 'these things happen' shrug. "Good? Now hurry up before they start fighting. On second thought," Sirius stepped around Nott and up the stairs. Harry, Tonks, and two girls about Harry's age (one of whom he would have guessed was a Weasley, if he didn't know better about Weasley girls, and how they didn't exist) were huddled in the middle of the entrance hall, shield charms up. Their Slytherin classmates formed a solid mass around them. Sirius put his best Dark Lord voice on. "Everybody cool it—I mean…lower your wands, peons of …darkness." It wasn't especially good, but the death eaters turned to listen anyway. "These four" he indicated the little irregularity. "Are faithful s-servants of mine. Under polyjuice potion. Obviously. I mean, do you think the real Harry Potter would apparate into the middle of a house full of death eaters?"

There was a resounding chorus of Yes's, and a few shouts of "That's exactly what he did last time."

"Did I just hear you question the motives of our new dark lord?" said Hermione, in her best peon-of-darkness voice. "Come," she prodded Harry gently. "We shall join our master in his…basement"

"Fortress." Tonks corrected quickly. "Of dastardly plans."

xXx

Back in the fortress of dastardly plans, Theodore Nott could hear the exchange upstairs. He took a long look at Remus Lupin, and made a decision.

"Professor?"

"Not anymore, but go ahead."

"If I leave now…I mean right now. Just apparate away."

Remus smiled. "I was hoping you were smarter than this. If you leave now, Theodore, then you were never here."

Theodore swallowed. "And if I had been…other places. Before this."

Remus hesitated. If Nott had become a death eater—a fully fledged death eater, taken the mark, then it was not entirely within Remus' authority to…

"My parents are dead, now, Mr. Lupin. I wasn't thinking straight. None of us were."

"Take people with you." Sirius and the new arrivals had come back through the basement door.

"I'm not sure I—"

"Convince your friends that you're all bound to be caught. Convince them Sirius is an incompetent leader—that one shouldn't be too hard."

"If I'm tried as a death eater, Mr. Lupin…"

Remus sighed.

"Then you certainly won't be the worst person the ministry lets off."

Theodore held Remus' gaze for a moment longer, then apparated away.

"What was that about?" Tonks asked, everyone having held a respectful distance at the bottom of the stairs.

"I just promised Theodore Nott…well, I'm not really sure, but I think I'm expected to keep him out of Azkaban if he gets caught."

"Here's hoping he wasn't half the death eater his father was…"

"So you're Sirius Black?"

Sirius turned to the redheaded girl. "Anticlimactic, isn't it?"

"I don't know if that's the right word for it." Hermione could concede that Black didn't live up to his reputation—which is to say he wasn't standing on a pile of corpses or sitting on a throne of skulls, and he certainly wasn't any good at commanding dark legions, but his army of death eaters was present enough to make up for it. "I'm Hermione Granger, by the way, and this is Ginny Weasley."

Pleasantries were exchanged, in the manner of people who have for the most part switched over to auto-pilot.

xXx

When the whole of Slytherin house had walked out on the battle of Hogwarts, they hadn't just disappeared. If they had stayed, they had fought, and if they had fought, they had lost, and then they had fled. Remus explained this, how he thought they had found them and why he thought they had come.

"…now we could inform the ministry," Said Remus. "But there are enough people up there to put up a fight, young though they may be. People might get hurt. People might get killed. Does anyone have any ideas for avoiding that?"

There were a few seconds of silence.

"I don't know if you noticed, Remus," said Harry, "but it's two in the morning, we're all piss drunk, and I haven't slept in three days. Are they going anywhere?" Harry pointed through the ceiling. "Are they going to keep 'till tomorrow?"

xXx

Harry and Ginny arrived at the Burrow and began heating up the leftover stew before they realized that Ron was missing.

"Ron, how much stew do you… oh _fuck_, Harry we left him in Hogsmede!"

That was when George appeared from behind an armchair, wand raised.

He did not look at all like he was kidding.

"George we—what's your problem..?"

George said nothing. Ginny and Harry reached for their wands.

"Don't. I…" he chewed his lip. "I can't think of anything to ask you. This is ridiculous."

"George, why would you need to ask us anything?" Harry asked slowly.

"I can't bloody well tell you until I've asked you." But, faced with the prospect of thinking up something to identify his sister and his brother's best friend, he found it was like being asked to describe his left hand. You _didn't._ You didn't need to know what your left hand looked like. It was just _there_. "Just…tell me something that only you would know, alright?"

Harry and Ginny thought for a moment.

"Merlin, this _is_ ridiculous."

"Marauder's map?" Harry ventured.

"Yeah, that's a good one. And I gave it to you…"

"Fourth year so I wouldn't get cornered or cursed in a corridor."

"Oh good." George sighed. "You can make sure Ginny's not being impersonated. Never make me do that again."

"But what was that even for?"

He indicated a letter laying open on the table, on the bright red parchment of an emergency ministry flyer. "I don't know if it was for you or for dad, but you know how it is. Bright red paper. You can't just let it sit there. And the clock had decided that Ginny was in mortal peril..."

Ginny's hand had moved to "Home", but Ron's was settled comfortably between "Out Drinking" and "In Jail," on the little-used slot labeled "Drunk in a Gutter."

"Flyer says the death eater's have got their hands on some polyjuice potion." George went on. "You two, and Hermione. And Tonks." He yawned, cracking his jaw and absentmindedly running a hand over where his ear used to be. "I'm going to bed, then. There's prototype hangover hash browns in the cooling cupboard, if you're feeling adventurous enough tomorrow." He disappeared up a flight of stairs, paused, and came back down. "Neither of you can side-along apparate, can you."

Harry and Ginny shook their heads.

"We were at the Three Broomsticks." Offered Ginny. "He can't have gone far."

Two pops later, Harry and Ginny helped Ron to his feet and George trudged up the stairs without another word.

xXx

A/n: Why is Fred dead but not Remus or Tonks? Well, to be honest with you, I forgot that the latter two died until a good chunk of the way through the interlude. Whoops. Go alternate universes.

(Interlude still isn't over, by the way. In case you were worried.)


	17. A Brief Interlude Part III

Well…hello. I received an unusually emphatic and flattering request to continue this fic… gosh, what has it been? Over a year since I updated? Ridiculous. Let's see if I can't wrap this train wreck up into a neat little package and stop feeling guilty about leaving the eight or nine people who actually read this hanging.

Brief Interlude III

It was, all things considered, a fairly good speech. Rousing. Impassioned. Plenty of "blood-of-our-enemies" and "vengeance-for-the-dead," and as many choruses of "FOR THE DARK LORD" as Sirius could stomach, which was one. The clincher was his promise that any coward who stayed behind would be torn limb from limb, though he worried that he might have overdone it when he threatened to play the xylophone on their bleached ribcages. It turned out not to have mattered. There was no evil his reputation would not expand to accommodate.

When it was over (with a mass dissapparation like hail on a tin roof) Sirius sat alone in the kitchen, slightly stunned that it had worked at all. Then he remembered, with an amused sort of wistfulness, that he had once considered himself a pretty nice guy, overall. Not a saint, obviously, but if someone had told him twenty years ago that he would one day threaten to play the xylophone on some kid's ribcage…well, he would have laughed, because it would have been stupid.

He didn't laugh now.

It was only almost funny.

The sun crept high enough above the horizon for reasonable people to be awake. Remus apparated into and emerged tentatively from the basement, marveling at his nearly-empty but completely trashed house.

"You…" he began, unsure of how he would finish.

"I'm not…evil." Said Sirius, apropos of nothing, then glanced at Remus as if he was unsure.

"How did…?" Remus disregarded Sirius' half-question and tried again. "They're gone."

Sirius nodded. "I talked to them. Did a lot of threatening people at the top of my voice." He sounded slightly hoarse, like he had just done a lot of threatening people at the top of his voice. "I guess what I did is organized an attack on the ministry, but…" Remus' expression barely changed. "Well, I did it in a way that…_Ideally_, they won't actually…go." He stared thoughtfully into the pattern of the kitchen floor tiles. "The idea just sort of popped into my head. Seemed good as any. I figured the handful of them stupid enough to actually go along with what I told them…" he smirked half-heartedly. "They probably deserve what they'll get. Which is…Arrested. And laughed at. I gave a sort of…speech." He explained. "Should have told anyone with half a brain that I was a raving lunatic."

Remus leaned against the counter and inspected the damage a few dozen young death eaters had managed to inflict overnight. It looked more like the house had played host to starving chimpanzees.

"And evil." Sirius added, somewhat to himself.

"I'm afraid you can't stay here anymore." Said Remus. Sirius looked as though he had swallowed an ice-cube, and felt about the same. "I'm sure at least one of them told the ministry where to find you, when they realized you were an evil lunatic."

Sirius wanted to say something stoic and understanding like "I understand," but he couldn't manage it. He just clenched his jaw and continued to stare at the kitchen floor.

"And besides that, there's nothing left to eat here."

Sirius barely heard him.

"Unless you want to eat the cabinets…" Remus took a closer look. "…though I'm pretty sure someone's already tried." He glanced back at Sirius. "You're looking unusually grim. What I'm saying is…come back home with me. We'll have pancakes or something. I'm sure Dora won't mind."

Sirius briefly struggled to remember how his lungs worked.

"You can meet the kid…told you I've got a kid, haven't I?"

"Aren't you afraid I'll…rip out his spine…play the xylophone on his bleached ribcage?"

The question, at face value, might have made Remus worried about just that. Instead he smiled. He almost laughed. Coupled with Sirius' expression of sincere concern, it was one of the stupidest things he had ever heard. "That is" he said "One of the stupidest things I have ever heard."

It didn't seem to reassure him.

"No, Sirius. I don't think you're going to play the xylophone on my son's ribcage after you've ripped out his spine." Remus ran a hand over the apparent bite-marks in the woodwork, wondering how best to phrase it. "You're not…evil."

It seemed the right thing to have said.

"That's it." That was what he had woken up knowing—and what had brought him here with a half-dead dog animagus in the first place. "You're not evil, Sirius." It was almost sad how relieved he looked at hearing this. "Surprise." Added Remus. "You might not even be a lunatic."

"These pancakes…" said Sirius. "…chocolate chip?"

"I know of no other kind."

End of Brief Interlude


	18. 15: In Which There Is No Murdering

15: In Which There Is No Murdering

There was a world where Neville Longbottom bore a lightning-bolt scar and the title of "boy-who-lived". There were two worlds where Harry Potter was boy-who-lived, and another where not very many people had lived at all. Dumbledore labled these-A through D (though not in that order), and four different Dumbledores provided four different identification sheets for four different misplaced Siriuses. Sirius A (also known as "The chipper one" and "you lucky bastard") immediately re-dubbed himself Awesome Sirius. Sirius B, hailing from a world where almost everyone he cared about had died and Voldemort ruled what was left of the world, read the other two Sirius identification sheets and realized things hadn't gone that badly for him after all. Sirius B seemed nickname enough until he thought up Badass Sirius. The last two Siriuses (C and D) ended up with the nicknames "Good Azkaban Sirius" and "Evil Azkaban Sirius," respectively, but they privately re-nicknamed themselves Cool Sirius and Damnable Sirius, not to be outdone by their counterparts.

"Evil Azkaban Sirius?" James repeated, incredulous, in the aformentioned world where Nevil Longbottom had defeated Voldemort and Damnable Sirius, while not exactly pretending to be unconcious on the floor of Dumbledore's office, was laying quite still and it was no fault of his if people had drawn the wrong conclusions. "We definitely drew the short straw this time around."

"Stop it, James."

"Though I don't imagine 'Good Azkaban Sirius' would have been much fun either."

"I mean it, if you're not going to be civil-"

"Speaking of civil, did you see he tried to murder our son?"

"If Sirius really wanted to kill someone he could do a bit better than a cutting curse."

"He's not Sirius."

"Then you can't really call the boy he cursed 'our son,' can you?" She laid a hand on his shoulder and pushed him gently out of the office. "Go on. You can take Harry and Neville and Kate into Hogsmede for a while. Dumbledore and I will sort this out." The rest of James' protestations were indicipherably muffled through the stone wall, and gradually fading. Eventually there was nothing but the whirring silver not-quite-silence of Dumbledore's empty office. He had to wonder if it was particularily engineered to instill calm in whoever listened it. Probably not. Probably just a side effect of Dumbledore's sort of...Dumbledoreness. Sirius was torn unpleasantly from his musings by the sensation of a bag of ice landing squarely on his chest from across the room.

"For your face." explained Lily, settling into an armchair. "If you need it."

Sirius squirmed out from under the ice bag.

"...apologize for him being such an arse, but I doubt he'll apologize to you personally..."

It was a peculiar thing, really. A bag full of ice. The way it moved.

"...to know that it's not... well...you can chime in any time, here, Sirius..."

A muggle thing. Not much call for it in magical society.

"I know you can talk, Sirius, you bloody well introduced yourself to me."

How very like her.

He ripped open the plastic with his teeth and started chewing on the ice.

Lily sighed lightly. The man across the room from her seemed to be eating his ice pack. "I suppose this explains them calling you 'only intermitently capable of or inclined towards polite conversation.' "

Sirius smirked. "That was nice of them." he said. "I mean, intermitent conversation sure, I can handle that, but..." He smiled and spewed shards of ice as he spoke. "...they called it _polite._"

"Don't be silly, you've been the very pink of courtesy."

"_The very-_" he choked down half an ice cube "Lily, I'm eating a bag of ice."

"Which I only gave you because my husband _punched you in the face_."

"I've been about as responsive as a brick wall."

"You haven't tried to murder a single person all day."

"Oh yes, that's chapter three in my etiquette book-_No Murdering People. _Shame it's taken me thirty-seven years to read through_ One: Flower Arrangements _and_ Two: How to Throw a Dinner Party_._"_

"And look-you even remembered my name."

"We were friends for six years, Lily." Sirius realized what he was saying too late for him to stop saying it. "I shouldn't have forgotten it in the first place."

This silenced both of them. Lily stared thoughtfully at Sirius' averted gaze, and Dumbledore's silver instruments whirred on.

xXx

"Could have been worse." said James. "We could have gotten '_Evil_ Azkaban Sirius.'"

They had exiled Not-Quite-Sirius to the stairwell (in spite of his assurance that he could tell them personally anything Dumbledore thought they ought to know) for their reading of his identification sheet. It had seemed strange to do it in front of him.

"Told you there was something wrong with him, didn't I?"

"Stuff it, Reg." He threw the balled up identification sheet at Regulus. "That's one of the saddest damn things I've ever read. Can't exactly blame the guy for looking a bit pale."

"No, the tragedy here is that a world full of people incompitent enough to lock Sirius up for killing _you_-" ("Pretty fucking incompitent" James conceeded.) "-still managed to defeat Voldemort. One bloody spell gone wrong. And yet, here _we_ are-"

"I know, Reg."

"-can't even accurately call it a war anymore, since we're not-"

"I _know_, Reg." James pulled off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "Just...stuff it."

xXx

Dumbledore had delivered the identification sheets to his office and vanished on mysterious business, as a man of his reputation could do whenever he pleased.

He had been struck with a dangerous thought; if he were to change places with himself for a while-just for a little while- would anyone even notice? He wouldn't do it, of course. Unessicary meddling. Dangerous magic and little to gain. It would have been a small matter, though, for him to arrange it with himself through the archway. To apparate to the chamber, step through the veil, and apparate back to his office again. It would be a matter of minutes, and really...who would ever guess?

But it was simply not like Dumbledore to push the boundries of magic and knowledge and reality itself for the sake of his personal curiosity.

Much more like him to sit in his office with his books and his theories. He would relax...make some tea...wonder how he had ended up with an evil-tempered sandy-colored human-turned-ferret in a well-fortified cage behind his desk...

But he could probably last a while without it coming up in conversation.

Just for a little while, at least.


End file.
